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.
The installation Translator II: Grower Sabrina Raaf, on display at the Kunsthaus Graz and the Peeler Art Center, consists of a small robotic vehicle that moves around the perimeter of a room, touching the walls. The machine is able to analyze the levels of carbon dioxide present in the air, thanks to the digital sensors that communicate wirelessly with a main sensor mounted on a wall of the exhibition space. The presence of the visitors and the amount of oxygen breathed have an immediate effect on the sensors of the robot which draws a vertical line the length of which corresponds exactly to the level of CO2 exhaled and consequently the number of people passing into the exhibition space. Once you have completed a line, the robot moves a few millimeters and repeats the process. At the end of the performance, the base of the walls of the room is covered with thin green lines (some of which also arrive to the extent of 30 centimeters) that, taken as a whole, reminiscent of the section of a field of grass. According to Sabrina Raaf, the metaphor of the grass, which in nature need CO2 to grow lush, explains the significance of the artifice of a green field designed by a robot and that takes the breath of the visitors to grow, aiming to emphasize how the art institutions depend on their visitors for the development of thriving spaces for enjoyment of art. Undoubtedly, in the desire of the artist to represent the relationship between man and machine as viable entities, for which, in their mutual relate, the Grower, the exhibition space and the audience become one body metabolism, we find echoes of the reflection of Baudrillard on the system of objects in which "men and technical needs and objects are structured each other for good or for evil." But, if the perfection of the automatism of a machine can involve the risk of arrest technology, reducing the man's position to that of irresponsible viewer, in this case, thanks to the output of the artistic robot sensitive to environmental conditions, people present in the exhibition space begin to pay more attention to the environment itself, giving rise to a dynamic relational model in which machines and men shall exchange information and have no effect on each other through their cooperation. In this context, just as Baudrillard would say, manifests "the vocation of objects to the role of substitutes for human relationships. In its concrete function, the object is the solution of a practical problem. Inessential In its aspects is a solution of a social conflict or psychological. "
