Author: Margarita Osipian

Iran: Visibility, Blackouts, and the Platformed Battlefield

Alina Lupu

Fragments of war—missile strikes, phone recordings, air-defense footage, reposted clips—appear momentarily between memes, lifestyle videos, and other entertainment content. In this essay, Alina Lupu focuses on the experience of seeing the war in Iran through the logic of the personalised feed. … Read More

Alina Lupu is a Romanian-born, Amsterdam-based post-conceptual artist, writer, photographer, and activist that is overly online, in an attempt to investigate how images shape social movements and how art can contribute to imagining alternatives to exploitative political and economic systems.

Respite: an interactive essay

Livi Wilmore

In this interactive essay, Livi Wilmore takes a satirical deep dive into our need for mindless soothing respite from information overload and the tensions we feel between wanting to be informed and wanting to rest. … Read More

Blurring the lines between contemporary art, participatory installation, and public service announcement, Livi Wilmore uses gamified essays, installations, and speculative fiction to explore nostalgia, escapism, and the internet to gain an understanding of the societal impact of information overload and the internet. Livi gives reverence to the World Wide Web by exploring it as a physical location that we visit and have the choice to either consciously or unconsciously navigate around. She also looks at the spatial metaphors and environments of the web as a mirror world—from exploring cyberspace and creating GeoGities to Gen Z’s affiliation with liminal spaces mirroring the IRL death of the highstreet.

Bombardiro Bodies: Masculinity, Fascism, Marinetti and a Millennial Transmasc in the Age of Italian Brainrot

Mel Ghidini

In this essay, writer Mel Ghidini explores masculinity and the links between Italian brainrot, fascism, concrete poetry, and Futurism from a transmasc and queer perspective. … Read More

Mel Ghidini would have liked to become a poet, a writer and an artist but never quite understood what all these words meant. Currently, they are part of the Monstrous Futurities programme at Sandberg Instituut and a proud member of the trans led project space Bagnomaria in Milan. Throughout their transdisciplinary artistic and writing practice they’ve been fascinated by the intersections between writing, voice, text and the body (human, non-human and more than human) and have recently been interested in exploring listening and attuning as potential tools for collective resistance and change.

Introduction

In 2022 the metaverse seemed like the next big thing, but as we make our way into 2023 it looks like AI is on everyone’s minds. … Read More

AI and the Changing Landscape of Work

In this interview with Babusi Nyoni we talk about how AI is changing the landscape of labour. … Read More

A Blacker Box

Matthew C. Wilson

In this image contribution, Matthew C. Wilson uses images produced by Midjourney to take us into the realm of bio-engineering, ‘generative’ AI, and the quiet transformation of biological life. … Read More

Matthew C. Wilson is an American filmmaker and artist based in the Netherlands. In his videos, sculptures, and installations viewers meet a range of agents — human, non-human, and inter-subjective — entangled with natural processes and shape-shifting historical forces. His projects utilize research-oriented, site-specific, and methodologically eclectic approaches to track the inertia of modernity through contemporary ecological crises and into speculative futures. Wilson holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University. He has been a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program and numerous residencies including Skowhegan, Jan van Eyck Academie, and Tabakalera Artistic Research Residency, among others. His moving image work has been screened on Vdrome.org as well as at IFFR – International Film Festival Rotterdam, the Eye Filmmuseum in Amsterdam, and HKW – Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin. Wilson’s most recent exhibitions include Galeria SKALA in Poznań, PL (solo) and Walk&Talk Festival of Art in São Miguel, Açores, PT.

“What the fuck is happening?” An interview with Nadia Piet on our current state of AI

Nadia Piet

In this interview with Nadia Piet, founder of AIxDesign, we explore the intersection of AI and design, try to untangle what is going on with AI today, and discuss the AI worlds that we want to see brought into being. … Read More

Nadia Piet is an independent designer, researcher, organizer, and cultural producer with a focus on AI/ML, data, tech, digital culture and creativity. She’s the founder of AIxDESIGN a community of practitioners & living lab for beyond-corporate AI, holds an MA in Data-Driven Design, and explores playful & purposeful tech through freelance projects and self-initiated experiments. Over the past 10 years, she’s worked as Head of Creative Technology at DEPT a global digital agency, design researcher for emerging technologies at Bit, and across roles and continents with organisations such as Hyper Island, Pi Campus, Forbes, UN, AWWWARDS, DECODED, MOBGEN | Accenture Interactive, Mozilla, and ICO.

In the news lately: Artificial intelligence, VR, accelerated timelines, ethical questions, have you considered taking a job as a dog walker instead?

Alina Lupu and ChatGPT

With image- and text-generating AI tools infiltrating the cultural field, our ways of working are growing more precarious. Writer and post-conceptual artist Alina Lupu takes us on a dark and humorous doom-scroll through the latest AI news. … Read More

Alina Lupu was born and raised in Romania and works as a writer and post-conceptual artist in Amsterdam. Her works were presented, among others, at IMPAKT.NL – Utrecht, VHDG – Leeuwarden, W139 – Amsterdam, Onomatopee – Eindhoven, Hotel Maria Kapel – Hoorn, Drugo More – Rijeka, Room Rheum – Basel, European Lab – Lyon, Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung – Berlin, and Goethe Institut – Bucharest. She is a board member of Platform BK—an organisation that researches the role of art in society and advocates for a better art policy, a student of the Master Photography and Society at the Royal Academy of the Arts, the Hague, and a former member of the Art and Spatial Praxis research group at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, where she analysed the role of artists in gentrification processes. Alina’s practice was described as follows, by the jury of the Sybren Hellinga Art Prize for which she was nominated: “Alina Lupu is fighting for a fairer world in her work. She consistently examines the ways in which the conditions are set for participation in the economy, or how the economy is shaped, and who is thereby included or excluded and consequently at risk of marginalization. These are topics of great importance for workers’ determination at a time when direct transactions seem to become more accessible, but in reality also ever more elusive.”

ChatGPT is an AI creation designed to assist, educate, and engage users. Trained on a wide range of internet text, it provides information, answers questions, and engages in meaningful conversations on diverse topics. With no personal experiences or emotions, ChatGPT prioritizes privacy and ethics. It continually evolves and is available 24/7 to help with queries or engage in chat, making it a valuable digital companion for those seeking knowledge and conversation. (Disclaimer: this bio was written by ChatGPT on October 9, 2023)

This is the first time that Alina Lupu and ChatGPT have written a text together for The Hmm.

Introduction

The metaverse is on everyone’s minds, but what kind of metaverse do we really want to bring into being? … Read More

Architectures to Host the Metaverse: An interview with Marina Otero Verzier

Margarita Osipian interviews Marina Otero Verzier about how we can reimagine the metaverse, it’s architectural underpinnings, and it’s potentialities.… Read More

Language Processing: An AI generated glossary for the metaverse

An AI-generated glossary that unpacks all the metaverse-esque terminology in our digital vocabulary. … Read More

The Hmm Hybrids 2: The Power of the Chat

The chat is an essential part of livestreamed events, and maybe even our internet experience in general. In this hybrid newsletter we look back at, and towards the future of, the chat. … Read More

The Power of the Poor Image

Margarita Osipian

Margarita Osipian shares eight inspiring works from the Small File Media Festival—showing the beauty of the tiny image. … Read More

Introduction

The pandemic shifted and re-shaped our societies, but what impact did it have on the monopolisation of Big Tech? … Read More

Humour in Pandemic Times

Giselinde Kuipers and Mark Boukes

In this image contribution, Giselinde Kuipers and Mark Boukes trace the global humour cycle of the pandemic through memes.… Read More

Giselinde Kuipers is a professor of sociology at the KU Leuven in Belgium. She is a cultural and comparative sociologist who studies the social shaping of cultural standards in today’s increasingly globalized fields and societies.

Mark Boukes is an Associate Professor of Corporate Communication in the Department of Communication Science at the University of Amsterdam.

Giselinde and Mark, together with an international team of humour researchers, are studying humour in times of Covid.

The Hmm Hybrids 1: The Joy of Getting Ready 

We’ve really missed the pre-event rituals that seemed to have disappeared with online events. How do we bring them back into the livestreamed experience? … Read More

Introduction

What are the causes and impacts of the domination of US tech companies around the world?… Read More

An imperfect digital world

Multidisciplinary artist Ibiye Camp shares her work ‘Data, the New Black Gold’ which explores how data has materialised in the West African landscape.… Read More

A seat at the table

Margarita Osipian

Margarita Osipian interviews Neema Iyer about gender, equitable internet access, and how to improve data governance across African countries.… Read More

Learning to listen

A collection of ‘must listen’ podcasts on digital colonialism. … Read More