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 ‘hacking’ practice is an overused and misunderstood term in pop culture and contemporary arts. ‘Hacking’ usually carries negative connotations and it is used referring the activity of breaking into computer systems. Nevertheless, in the computer programming community, the term ‘hack’ refers to aclever problem solution, therefore a creative and transformative act. Appropriation, transformation and re-generation are post-modern artistic practices meant to hack new material out of a found object. Social hacking, then, means hacking in the realm of human communication and social interaction. This is the concept behind Social Hacking, a series of temporary (21-24 March) public art commissions for Plymouth by international artist groups acting against a backdrop of urban regeneration. The commissioned works from The Institute for Applied Autonomy (USA), Mikro Orchestra Project (Poland), and Ludic Society (Austria/Switzerland) respond to the social and cultural context of Plymouth and explore the above theme. Mikro Orchestra Project runs workshops with young people on how to intervene in Gameboy consoles changing them in musical instruments. Institute for Applied Autonomy examines the so-called ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA through two projects: a commemorative plaque of the world’s first global communications network crash in 1858 and its historical connection to Plymouth, and the installation ‘Terminal Air’, a digital world map that visualizes the movements of planes involved in ‘extraordinary rendition’. Ludic Society construct a ‘total conversion’ of computer games using American muscle cars and RFID technologies. They also present their ‘Tagged City Play’ for Real Players in a Real City. The aim is to extend hacking ideas out of computers to people communicative structures, social interactions and the use of public spaces. The involved projects modify popular technologies for creative experimentation and question the usual distinction between digital space and real public space in the city. Organized by KURATOR in collaboration with i-DAT, and funded mainly by Arts Council England, South West and Plymouth City Council, the event also includes performances, seminars and workshops. As the English Guardian newspaper ironically titled: ‘Blimey, an actual real reason to go to Plymouth’.
Valentina Culatti
