Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
The Neural Archive is a repository of publications collected by us during the years. Browse our collection here.
Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.
The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.
Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.
YesNo by Timo Kahlen feels like “traditional” net art, a well crafted stuck webpage for the user’s aural and clickable enjoyment.
The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”
Harsh Noise Wally, is a sophisticated mashup mixing strips of Wally, the lazy and cynic colleague of Dilbert with some epic noise music extreme attitudes. Well conceived and assembled.
Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400
GoPro ancestors in the 1960s and 1970s, mainly sport and movie persons like F1 driver Jackie Stewart, Bob Sinclair and Steve McQueen.
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08.05.03 Radiator 002, technology as a way to mediate reality.
Technology as a mediation factor between physical space and artificial reality, a tool for extracting the art work from the PC screen and put it in a suitable social context. This is the principle inspiring Radiator 002, a new media art festival which opened on May 3 in Nottingham (UK). The permanent installations are: ‘Peace Keeper’, by Tom Betts (alias Nullpointer), a modified videogame where two bots are programmed to kill each other, systematically respawning after every death, all of which in the complete abstraction of the geometric shapes generated by the manipulation of the source code; ‘TargetArt’, on the other hand, is an interactive installation which analyzes the user’s personality, describing it through universal pictograms; ‘G(Host)’ is a performance by Matt Hawthorn involving the visitors, showing them hidden places (in fact completely made up) of the city through a personal screen, in a tourist trip based on lies. ‘Tails (My Father Told Me)’, by Rona Lee, is a life-sized projection on the glass tower of the local Broadway, where the economy of bodies is rethought in its complexity; ‘Broadway Hertz’, curated by the company Stan’s Cafe, records the sounds and vibrations around it and reproduces them in a chaotic remix; finally, the interactive videoinstallation ‘Exhibition’, by Richard Squires, where the nervous tics of the main character emerge unpredictably. Also scheduled are the presentations of Marko Peljhan’s Makrolab, Blast Theory’s GPS performances, a demonstration of sculptures prototyped using dedicated hardware and software and the ‘Home Maker’ project by Jeanie Finlay. There will also be workshops on robotics, gps drawing, live streaming and game programming, a jam session in the Trampoline Night, and a VJing session by av_dv with Noel Murphy, as well as a whole day of meetings with the local digital creation businesses and institutions.
