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.
Artists have always been fascinated by imperfection. A little failure, a small mistake, an unexpected behaviour can be perceived as more meaningful and intriguing than the perfect artwork. This is even more relevant in the computer world where pushing the breaking point of technology is common practice, as shown by a renewed interest in glitch aesthetics over the past few years. A recent example of an art project intrigued by software malfunctions is Extrafile by Kim Asendorf. It consists of a native Mac OS X image converter application with the ability to open, preview and save the most common image file formats in seven different new formats: 4Bit Components, Block Ascii, Block Indexed, Channel Compressed Image, Monochrome Collector File, Uniform Spectrum and the ExtraFile Format, each one with its own properties. With this new set of formats, the aim is to “wiggle the static system of image file formats” and give the artist complete control over their digital artwork. Formalising the visual aspect of glitches in new fictitious ways outside the commercial formats allows the artist to exercise control and to not be at the mercy of the computer. It also provides exclusivity for the artists, so they’re not just using the same old formats as everyone else. As Asendorf puts it “ExtraFile is a pioneer art project in storing image data. The process and the resulting bytes, regardless of content, become the artwork itself”. Being a software art project, Extrafile’s potential as a process is increased by its open source nature. The source code is indeed available on GitHub under the Artistic License 2.0, making this piece conceptual software art with practical usage – quite a rare quality in the online art scene.
Valentina Culatti
