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“I thought about dolls as empathy machines, providing a service, and as some kind of magic object.”
“It is possible that future administrations could take this case as encouragement to pursue the press under the Espionage Act. It is likely that an emboldened second Trump administration would do so.”
Brazillian developer Luizão releases schematics for a scaled-down version of the core rope memory module used by NASA in the 1960s. Deployed in interplanetary probes and the Apollo Guidance Computer, core rope memory is woven read-only memory that uses magnetic cores and wires to store data. Luizão’s implementation has 12 addresses x 8 bit values (96 bit memory)—a rotary dial cycles between data stored in each core, which is indicated by varying light combinations at the top of his assembly.
A show about how information “manipulation and obfuscation is the norm rather than the exception” in public discourse, “Really? Art & Knowledge in Time of Crisis” opens at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. Paolo Cirio, Zheng Mahler, Ho Tzu Nyen, and others present works on post-truth knowledge flows for curators David Garcia and Mi You. Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich’s Terror Element (2024, image), for example, is a CGI documentary “exploring the investigative method and fallibility of truth.”
“It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did.”
A collaboration between CERN and the Galician Institute of High Energy Physics (IGFAE), Armin Linke’s “Instruments of Vision” opens at the historic Igrexa da Universidade church in Santiago (ES). Presenting a selection of photographs shot over the more than two decades the Italian artist has spent documenting research at European particle physics facilities, the Mónica Bello-curated show starkly juxtaposes images of technocratic scientists and their tools with the divinity of a baroque church.
Coinciding with the summer solstice, Irish artist John Gerrard’s yearlong performance crystalline work (arctic) (2024-25, image) commences on Feral File. The browser-based simulation presents a top-down view of a robot arm operating at the North Pole, organizing tiny light-catching shards into ornate crystal patterns called ‘archetypes.’ The 24 archetypes produced per solar day are tokenized as NFTs, and Gerrard will donate 25% of sales revenue to help restore the Wild Atlantic Rainforest in Connemara (IE).
“Crystalline work is present in the browser for a global audience. For me, this space—the phone, the screen—it’s the key interface for public art. And WebGL is the key medium for it right now.”
“These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency, or accountability.”
“PART TIME COMMITMENT SERIES,” a programming cycle exploring time and productivity, kicks off at Munich’s Lothringer 13 Halle (DE). Its first chapter presents Out of Your Head and Into my Body (2024, image), an installation by the OTC collective that mirrors workers in an assembly in which components “are connected to each other, face each other, hold each other.” Future chapters include presentations on agricultural and industrial labour by Verena Hägler and Nicola Reiter and an anti-work session.
Spanning two venues, Basel Abbas & Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s “The song is the call, and the land is calling” opens at Copenhagen Contemporary (CC) and Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek. At CC, they present May Amnesia: Only Sounds that Tremble Through Us (2020-, image), a poetic remix of social media clips depicting joyful moments of song and dance from Iraq, Palestine, and Syria. The work by the duo—both of Palestinian descent—explores “how shattered communities resist annihilation and reclaim place, self, and community.”
“The exhibition frames the history of zines as communities building toward a collective call for larger-scale resistance to capitalism and a rejection of the attitudes expected of bodies within it.”
Foregrounding artists born in the early 1980s through the mid-’90s, “Millennials: The Media Art of Generation Y” opens at LABoral in Gijón (ES). Curated by Pablo de Soto, artists including Emanuel Gollob, So Kanno, and Maria Smigielska & CompMonks are featured. Questions of social justice and criticality are top of mind, as exemplified by OPN Studio’s The Pure Voice—Undoing Gender (2022, image), where viewers speak into a microphone and “free their voices from normative gender” via its wild audiovisual transformation.
“Now we’re so separated and split up that we don’t have this single mass-mediated culture anymore. We have these commodified, cellular microcultures which are turned into products and mechanisms of online engagement.”
Claire Bishop
Disordered Attention
“This is Apple’s pitch distilled: the messy edges of your life, sanded down via Siri and brushed aluminum. You live; Apple expedites.”
A tour “leading us through the geological ages of the Earth all the way to space,” Pauline Julier’s “A Single Universe” opens at Aargauer Kunsthaus in Aarau (CH). The Swiss artist and filmmaker presents works linking the deep time of terrestrial biomes to a Martian mountain range. Multimedia installations including Follow the Water (2023, image), which explores water rights and landscapes, and Naturalis Historia (2017-19), an interrrogation of our “thinking and representation of nature,” are featured.
“Even banal systems like campus ID cards, presence monitors, class attendance monitoring, and WiFi access points can create a record of student locations or tip off schools to people congregating.”
“Sometimes artists are being deliberately ambient and non-spectacular. And sometimes what seems appealing and fascinating turns out to be quite empty.”
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