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.
“Hello! Hello! Can You Hear me?” is a leitmotif that constantly re-emerges in mobile phone conversations. Such phrases are often associated with rising volume levels in the speaker’s voice and sometimes represent a source of disturbance for nearby listeners extraneous to the exchange. It is also the refrain sung by a chorus of loudspeaker robots in Hermes, a “mobile phone opera” by Karl Heinz Jeron. The media artist has found an entertaining way to diffuse what he describes as the annoying experience of listening to cell phone monologues when travelling on public transportation. Keeping a record of private business that mobile phone users share while commuting, he has filled two notebooks with transcripts of his eavesdropping activity and has used the material as a source for an opera libretto. Hermes is divided in four miniature acts, in which overheard segments of mobile phone conversations are combined along the themes of secrecy, sex, guilt and betrayal, offering a psychoanalytic portrait of the insecurity of lovers that recalls the dialogues published by R.D. Laing in “Do You Love Me?”. A mindless drama in which biological urges subvert the logical structure of language, appropriately enacted here by two robots that process text with a voice synthesizer. During a performance of Hermes two artificial entities assembled with scrap materials recite a hardly comprehensible sprechgesang while sluggishly moving about the stage. The action is just about as enticing as that of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde”, giving a good feeling of the extended experience of the former in a condensed duration of approximately 20 minutes. The result is a full-fledged spectacle staged by a single individual on the subject of mobile phone romance. Compared to other performances attempting to sexualize the unsexy, such as Danny Boyle’s mass staging of “the networked age” during the 2012 Olympic opening ceremony, Jeron’s absurdist take on the topic provides more of an insight into the perpetual drive to reproduce that generates exponential growth in both carbon and silicon based systems.
Matteo Marangoni
