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“I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be an appalling place.”
The first Generative Art Summit kicks off at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste, celebrating the legacy of late pioneer Herbert W. Franke with fellow legends (Frieder Nake, A. Michael Noll, Christa Sommerer), key curators and researchers (Sabine Himmelsbach, Margit Rosen, Grant D. Taylor), and today’s pioneers (Sougwen Chung, Mario Klingemann, Sasha Stiles). Hosted by the art meets science foundation—Franke’s estate—the summit concludes with a field trip to preview a new survey exhibition in Wolfsburg.
“One of the key attributes of dreams is that they feel real in the moment. When I looked at my hands and saw the mutant flippers of a Midjourney hallucination, I felt the walls drop. My whole body flushed. Nothing was real here—least of all me.”
Japanese artist-engineer collective Rhizomatiks opens the black box of AI image generation in “Rhizomatiks Beyond Perception,” a sprawling solo exhibition at KOTARO NUKAGA gallery’s new and expanded Tokyo venue. For this, the group led by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi trained their own model on 170,000 images of past Rhizomatiks works and reveals the 50 steps it takes to generate a new image. On sale aren’t the five outputs Manabe hand-picked for the show, but the AI Beyond Perception Model (2024).
“Breathing Particles,” the first of two exhibitions featuring the works of the 2024 Tokyo Arts and Space (TOKAS) resident creators, opens at the TOKAS Hongo venue. Cuban media artist Nestor Siré’s video and hardware installation PC Gamer [GOMA] (2024, image), for example, draws from both local DIY practices and the CubaCreativa he researches back home. The tire-housed gaming PC was inspired by the resiliency of the Havana gaming community, built with locally-sourced second-hand components, and optimized at the Tokyo Hacker Space.
“I thought about dolls as empathy machines, providing a service, and as some kind of magic object.”
Showcasing UK artist Anthony McCall’s multi-decade exploration of sculptural projection, “Solid Light” opens at the Tate in London. Covering the gamut of his Solid Light Works, featured installations span Line Describing a Cone (1973), in which a 16 mm film project traces a conical volume, through Split-Second Mirror (2018, image), in which a mirror interrupts a plane of light. McCall’s recent works push at “reinterpreting sculptural space using cinematic devices,” write curators Gregor Muir and Andrew de Brún.
“Through braces, belts, straps, and medical tubing, the support and treatment of the body is made visible as a jarring domain of restraint and domination.”
A remote summer series about online identity, “Profiling” kicks off at MIT’s List Visual Arts Center. Commencing with Mary Stephenson’s My Director & Me (2024, image), a whimsical home performance about an imaginary film shoot that participants enact by following a provided script, five artist-designed questionnaires and exercises will be issued over email. Subsequent releases from Lauren Lee McCarthy, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, Mariam Suhail, and Anne Le Troter are slated for July and August.
“New art grows with an undeclared agenda. Generative art may be a temporary title, and NFTs might gradually acquire a new narrative reaching for the latest system of identifying authenticity and the right of possession.”
“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.”
“Really? Art and Knowledge in Time of Crisis” opens at Framer Framed, Amsterdam, parsing post-truth infrastructures—the 24-hour news cycle, social media—“where manipulation and obfuscation is the norm rather than the exception.” Seven artists and collectives including Paolo Cirio, Anna Engelhardt & Mark Cinkevich, Ho Tzu Nyen, and UKRAiNATV present works that create new ways of knowing. Cirio’s Climate History (2024, image), for example, compiles a 100-year timeline of economic and political wrong-doing.
“The game’s grotesque, hyper-synthetic eats are a critique of a near-future capitalist consumer culture that places next to no value on nutrition. [The] plastic-texture pizzas are so unappetising they became a point of gamer outcry.”
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.”
Geospatial data scientist Derek Taylor launches Climate Zones, a web-based visual essay that shows how the climate classifications of major cities will shift over the next half-century due to rising temperatures. Unsurprisingly, the prognosis is grim. “In the near future, people might brag about their luxurious beachside resort in Copenhagen,” writes Taylor, imagining a ‘Scandanavian Riveria’ as an outcome of the northern region heating up from a cold to a temperate climate by 2070.
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).
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