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.
In the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) surrealism was defined in terms of automatism: “pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, the true functioning of thought”. One of the drawing techniques adopted to reveal the unconscious was Entopic Graphomania in which a dot is made at the site of each impurity or difference in colour in a blank sheet of paper, and then lines are drawn between the dots. In his latest work, Enphonic Graphomania (EG), Patrick Harrop has been inspired by this technique and has applied it to an interactive framework. EG is “an interactive drawing interface developed as a device for the co-structured development of drawing and sound pieces through the gestural and material actions of traditional drawing techniques”. You can interact with EG board using traditional tools: a pencil, archival paper and an eraser. The exercise consists of connecting 32 points marked by sensors on the page with graphite lines. The lines are generated spontaneous movements of the hand. As graphite is a conductor material, the denser the lines are the higher the voltage the sensors perceive. The variations are interpreted via algorithms based on the modulation of waves and are translated into sound. As Harrop puts it “The aim is an interdependent piece, mutually evolved through the craft of a practiced hand.” The word ‘entoptic’ derives from the Greek word meaning ‘within vision’. It refers to images that arise from within the optical system rather than from the outside world. In EG’s case the automatism still stays in the vision, but the intersemiotic translation is performed via the gesture and revealed by a unique sound. The eye sees the dots, the hand draws and the sound reveals the stream of consciousness. The result is the visual sound of mania.
Valentina Culatti
