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The Digital Economies Reader was an evolving dossier produced over the course of the Digital Economies Lab.
Lead writer, Matthew Braga, was embedded with the DEL in Ottawa for its kick-off and followed along with the members and their projects as they unfolded over the course of the lab.
The Reader also includes reading recommendations and intersecting perspectives from beyond the lab.
HOLO emerged in 2012 to explore these entanglements—first with a periodical, now across an expanded platform. Set up in the grey zones between art, science, and technology, it frames scientific research and emerging technologies as being more than sites of invention and innovation—as epicentres of critical creative practice, radical imagination, and activism. The artists and designers working with related materials—algorithms and microcontrollers, meteoroids and fungi, data and archives—aren’t just updating notions of craft for the twenty-first century, they are researchers and cultural critics.
As an editorial and curatorial platform, HOLO occupies the same eccentric vantage points as these hybrid creative practices and puts them into perspective. Working across multiple avenues—print and online, events and production—HOLO collaborates with contributors and cultural partners to facilitate fruitful dialogue between domains and bring new voices into the conversation.
Matthew Braga is a writer and freelance journalist based in Toronto. He was previously a senior technology reporter for CBC News, an editor at VICE Media’s Motherboard, and a business and technology reporter for the Financial Post. He has written for Bloomberg Businessweek, The Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, BuzzFeed, The Outline, Canadian Business, The Walrus, The Atlantic, Atlas Obscura, Fast Company, and Ars Technica, among others, and has guest-hosted CBC’s daily news podcast Front Burner. He also manages Security Planner, an educational resource for digital security advice, run out of the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab.
Alexander Scholz is a Berlin-based writer, art director, and curator interested in interdisciplinary practice, artistic research, and how tools and technologies inform creative processes. He is the founder and creative director of HOLO, a periodical about emerging trajectories in art, science, and technology, and contributing editor at CreativeApplications.Net, the associated online resource on digital art and design. Beyond producing content within editorial frameworks, Alexander has developed a variety of programming for festivals such as ACT (Gwangju), Mapping (Geneva), MUTEK (Montréal), Resonate (Belgrade), and OFFF (Barcelona).
Greg J. Smith is a Canadian writer and cultural producer based in Hamilton, Ontario. He is the Editor of HOLO and a regular contributor to Musicworks, and his writing has appeared in a range of publications including Creative Applications Network, Rhizome, and Back Office. Greg is currently a PhD student in the Department of Communication Studies and Multimedia at McMaster University, where he is researching the emergence of the programmable drum machine in the early 1980s. Greg has presented work internationally at institutions and festivals including MUTEK, Artengine, The Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Eyeo, Sónar+D, and Medialab-Prado. He presently serves on the Board of Directors at InterAccess, and teaches at Ryerson University and the University of Waterloo.
Filip Visnjic is an architect, technologist, curator and a teacher, born in Belgrade, now living in London. He directs projects and contributes to blogs and magazines at the intersections of art, design and technology. He is a founder and editor of CreativeApplications.Net, editorial director of HOLO Magazine, platform director at FRAMED* and lectures at a number of universities in the UK. You can find him on Twitter, Instagram or LinkedIn.