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.
(In) Security Camera , designed by Benjamin Chang, Silvia Ruzanka and Dmitry Strakovsky, is an interactive installation made by means of a video camera connected to a computer with a particular software, through which you get a sophisticated view. The camera is designed to frame, zoom in and follow moving objects passing in front of his field of vision. Work on the basis of complex algorithms, their devices with artificial intelligence, now in use in the army and security forces U.S., coming to evaluate various levels of threat and appropriate response in real time. However, from the movie on this site, we can see that the camera will show slightly insecure. That is, is easily frightened by sudden movements, is "timid" with strangers and tends to divert direct contact with eyes, revealing to us his fallibility, as well as characteristics of the human personality, and therefore making us instinctively lean towards feelings of affection her. The relationship that develops between us and the camera becomes a "relationship typically society", as according to research at the Stanford Research Institute on the design of graphical user interfaces friendly, aimed at lowering the stress induced by new technologies. L 'installation also remembers the Alive Project of the Media Lab, inherent to the study of software agents that interpret the facial expression of' user thanks to a camera, to understand his state of mind and anticipate his reactions. Ultimately, the reversal of the relationship between a surveillance system and the supervised entities makes us reflect on the dualism between privacy and security, a subject of passionate debate, especially after the events of September 11: Since you can not stop the development of increasingly sophisticated tools used for control, equal access to information, or at least a large part of the available data, both on the part of those who control, both on the part of those who are controlled by appropriate legal instruments, such as the law on access to public information, Freedom of Information Act, would act as a deterrent against possible abuses.
