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.
Korsakow System is a database for the installation of interactive movies online and offline. Invented and developed by video artist Florian Thalhofer, takes its name from its first application [Korsakov Syndrom], interactive documentary on alcohol. The medical expression 'Syndrome Korsakow' indicates, in fact, a morbid picture typical of alcoholics, characterized by memory impairment in the short term with disorientation in time and space. The lack of recent memories is compensated by a tendency towards confabulation primarily, but also, paradoxically, by an articulated narrative ability. And Korsakow System is nothing more than a tool for digital storytelling, supported by a data base that allows a dynamic management of SNU (Smallest Narrative Units). Once categorized contributions, you can tell any kind of story, even if the system is best suited to documentary form, where the narrative units may be short interviews. Each interface screen film is a split screen with a major contribution in the foreground and three options in the preview at the bottom. Clips Randomly change in response to user selections. The software, developed together with the Mediamatic Foundation in Amsterdam, is available for download in a real kit that in addition to Korsakow System with user manual, contains a web engine for the online display of their work, a tool subtitle and a thumbnail editor. The concept behind the project are not unexplored: hypertext structure, perception random, zapping, stream of consciousness are the most obvious and fundamental. The idea of sequencing of portions of the text is as old as the art of story-telling. But if the current trend is towards the disarticulation of the temporal sequence (think of films like 'Mulholland Drive' by David Lynch or 'Memento' by Christopher Nolan) and spatial linearity (are sample videos of Michel Gondry or Chris Chunningam), the use of the database has made it more agile repetition and dislocation. Influenced by a variety of factors, narrative conventions change and interactive database narratives are interesting applications that best reflect the subjectivity of contemporary life in an increasingly dynamic and indefinite. To put it Manovich, thinking in images today means thinking about a database.
