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.
We can define “fake culture” as one of the most updated “detournement” embodiment, a concept periodically (re)discovered by artists. Facilitated by both the infinite possibilities of coding and the ocean of data on the net, a fake plays with the economy of attention struggling to be legitimated by enough online spectators. Fake is a fake by the Italian group Les Liens Invisibles is the ultimate tactical tool to fight against the online corporate media colonization of such attention. Using the very popular WordPress blog standard the project is aimed to build and, even more, to share templates that very closely resembles famous online media. In its very first release there are GPL licensed templates resembling the Financial Times, The White House, Le Figaro, La Repubblica, the German Federal Chancellor website, l’Osservatore Romano (the official Vatican newspaper, homage at the historical 0100101110101101.org vaticano.org fake), the Elysee and the WTO (another homage to the Yesmen and their WTO official website fake made with their Reamweaver “parodyware”). Naturally coupling these running files with a nice domain can easily do the job (actually the result is a sarcastic http://financialtimes.isafake.org for example). The duplication of digital information on one hand has already celebrated the death of the “original”, and on the other hand it pushes on the impossibility of establishing quickly the information sources reliability. Reappropriating mainstream communication spaces and manipulating it extensively means not only to play with its corporate aesthetics, but also to make their established popular identity more fragile. In the daily media hype smorgasbord, the “perception” is what rules on the web economy of attention, so a fake proliferation, that could be triggered by projects like this, can seriously start to question the media veneration by the masses. In 1976 the Italian visionary political zine A/traverso published an inspiring article entitled “false information produce real events”. Should we assume then that a different reality is just ready to strike back?
