The idea for HOLO crystallized at the Hat Creek Radio Observatory in Northern California — a fitting birthplace for a magazine about the spaces where art, science, and technology converge. The publication grew out of CreativeApplications.Net (CAN), a well-regarded blog that had spent years documenting digital art and creative coding. In late 2012, the team behind CAN — including editors Alexander Scholz, Filip Visnjic, and Greg J. Smith — launched a Kickstarter campaign for a print magazine that would go deeper than the daily blog format allowed. They wanted long-form profiles, studio visits, and thematic investigations that could sit on a shelf and age well.
The first issue launched in spring 2014 at EYEBEAM Art and Technology Center in New York, and it was immediately clear that HOLO was something special. At over two hundred pages per issue, the magazine operates closer to a monograph than a periodical, with the production values to match — each issue features custom typefaces, experimental cover designs generated through reader participation, and printing techniques that push what's possible on paper. Casey Reas, co-founder of Processing, called it "an extraordinary object and record."
The editorial scope is deliberately interdisciplinary: a profile of kinetic artist Zimoun might sit alongside an essay by James Bridle on surveillance, followed by a studio visit with generative designer Vera Molnár. Contributors come from Berlin, Toronto, London, and beyond — a network that reflects the global, nomadic nature of the creative practices HOLO documents.
Distributed through independent bookshops from Berlin's do you read me?! to Melbourne's mag nation, HOLO remains one of the most ambitious and beautiful publications at the intersection of art and technology — a magazine that proves print isn't just surviving in the digital age, but thriving precisely because of it.
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