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.
It started in Linz, as usual, Ars Electronica , which this year celebrates its 25 years of activity with the appropriate title for Timeshift, trying to look far in the two temporal directions (past and present) and trying to reflect on the lessons given the time and went on auspices of stimulating visions of the future. It is no coincidence that this issue coincides with the leave of the direction of the festival Gerfried Stocker, which must be acknowledged to have involved a fair view of reality provienienti from different cultural backgrounds in recent years ( 2002 and 2003 ), while it is not known yet who will take over. In the two-day conference which gives its name to the edition are placed among others, Roy Ascott, Sherry Turkle, Marvin Minsky (by videoconference), Jose-Carlos Mariategui, Peter Weibel, Esther Dyson, Jonah Brucker-Cohen , Joichi Ito and Bruce Sterling . Another central theme will be the 'Language of Networks', with a large group of theorists and artists who probe the representation and meaning of aesthetic and socio-political networks (including Brian Holmes , interviewed on Neural 21 ). Also pertains to this theme 'TraceEncounters', an interesting experiment involving a thousand visitors tracing the timing of individual contacts and displays them altogether. The usual presence of the Rising Sun, however, is, among other things, in a presentation Itsuo Sakana that draws inspiration from his collection of media art of the 50s and 60s, and the Academy of Fine Arts in which hosted the works of students of IAMAS, Japanese college dedicated to the training of young media artists. It should be noted then the space dedicated to the transformation of media, such as for 'Re-Inventing Radio', the symposium which traces the history and evolution of the radio used for artistic experimentation, with Heidi Grundmann of the historic Kunstradio, Bob Adrian, the New Zealanders Radioqualia , the theoretical Inke Arns , Gene Youngblood and Sabine Breitsameder . Noteworthy as well, in no particular order among the dozens of proposals, the spectacular DEMI-PAS Julien Maire, Matki Wandalki live Felix Kubin , Iso-phone telephone communication implemented with visual isolation and in a tub of water and audioMobile , work in a car with usable variations depending on its position determined by GPS. In one of expositions finally reappeared projects awarded by prix over the years, while 2004 winners were: Listening Post (Interactive Art) by Mark Hansen and Ben Rubin, 'Banlieue du Vide' Thomas Koner (Digital Music) Creative Commons (Net.Vision), ex-aequo Wikipedia and TheWorldStartsWithMe (Digital Communities) and Ryan by Chris Landreth (Computer Animation).
