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.
Scioltesi the promises of cheap special effects, artificial intelligence is used in art projects with good reason, with the emphasis on the autonomy of the code and its ability to effectively simulate life processes. A witness to this approach is eVolution , a current exhibition at the gallery Art Interactive in Cambridge (United States). Curated by Christiane Paul, presents works begin at different times, but the problem of a work of art 'living', which does not remain forever embedded in its historical period, but changing reaches a state of independence and evolves continuously. The works on display are four. 'Bush Soul # 3' by Rebecca Allen, is a project that has been ongoing since 1997 and is part of the broader Emergence. You control your avatar and all that does is' relate 'with the changing other in many ways, from the simple connotation of' friendly 'or hostile', to 'live' another avatar or receive feedback via a joystick. 'Giver of Names' David Rokeby, became operational in 1990 and is a system capable of analyzing the physical objects chosen by visitors, and describe them after they have 'seen'. The image processing is coupled to a database for associations, which also produces a series of sensations associated with forms, representing a temporary perception of the car that turns constantly. 'A-Volve' Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, however, allows users to create creatures that interact in the space of a small pool of glass, outlining his fingers a form that immediately takes connatati three-dimensional and 'swims' in the water, reacting to the movements of the hands of visitors. The form is inevitably the ability of the creature to survive and reproduce focusing on our role in influencing the development of ecosystems. 'Instant Places' of Maciej Wisniewski , finally, completed in 2002 is defined as a 'software fiction', in which, in a space interconnected autonomous living characters in the form of 'prey' and 'predators'. All the characters are identified by their characteristics (name, place, activity status) displayed in text next to them and interact with each other through instant messaging could also instantly switch from one computer to another on the network to which they belong, the disintegrating concept of physical space, and implementing a radical redefinition of the concept of distance.
