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.
See the Transmediale photo gallery.
Being Reality Addicts in a society highly mediated by technology means being techno-addicts. However if transmediale.06 is devoted to the artistic strategies that subvert the technological paradigm of reality, also ‘Smile MachinesÕ, the exhibition organized for the event, must be looked at from this point of view. According to Anne Marie Duguet, it is not an exhibition about humor, but a display on the ironic use of technology as subversive strategy. Derision, irony, mockery, parody, caricature, satire have been artistic practices of many movements during the twentieth century, from Dada to Surrealism, to Fluxus Situationism. Today the actual revival of interest in humour in all sectors of social life is a manifesto in the world of arts that finds its roots in the above mentioned movements. Artworks were regrouped according to main topics: derision by technology itself (The Helpless Robot by Norman White, Videogame by Stephane Gilot), art that laughs at art (The Thinker by Nam June Paik), the rumination in the media (Wonder Woman by Dara Birnbaum, Slogans by Antoni Muntadas), simulation as critical strategy (G3-Bureaucrazy by ubermorgen.com), and black humour (Back in Black by Maja Bajevic) vs. seeing life through rose colored glasses (CÕest bien la societe di Valerie Pavia). However the general impression you might have is that the themes are loosely connected by strong thesis and that the exhibition would have required a further level of legitimation. As Armin Medosch has pointed out, Smile Machines attracts neophytes of media art, including ‘historic worksÕ of the past 30 years, but it doesnÕt satisfy the experts. There is a lot of video, but few digital works and almost no networks. Thus, compared to the aim of the event, Smile Machines eludes the subversive practices connected to contemporary technologies. There is a smile on faces, like that brought for example by Agnes Meyer-Brandis with SGM Ð Iceberg Probe, the winner artwork of transmediale.06, parody of scientific experiments aimed to the conquest of space. However we are still conscious that in order to subvert reality we need artworks able to deeply combine technology, culture and society.
