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.
US + is a plug-in for the popular video chat service Google Hangout, born from the collaboration between Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald. After the very easy installation,US + appears in the chat window as a simple application. Users see a side box with two classic emoticons (orange and blue) that identify the two speakers. In the bottom area of the app window one bar chart describes a series of moods: positivity, self-absorption, femininity, aggression, honesty. At the beginning of the conversation the two emoticons are inexpressive (the line that describes the lips is horizontal) and the bars in the chart are monochrome. When someone starts talking these elements start their transformation. If one speaker smiles the corresponding emoticon smiles too (and vice versa), thanks to facial recognition implemented in the app. Even the bar graph goes into action: the bars indicate the percentage of the words that belong to the preselected moods, reflecting the speech of the two parties. The use of the LIWC text analysis software (Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count) makes this possible: it examines the vocabulary and calculates the occurrences and types of words used by each user (previously converted into text by Chrome Speech API). The information obtained is then poured in the graph indicating the respective percentage of positivity, self-absorption, femininity, aggression and honesty in the user’s conversation. But US+ was not only created to analyse and represent the conversation in progress. A lot of pop-up text messages constantly appear in the videochat window saying things like “stop talking about yourself so much” or “try to be more positive”. There is no risk of boring soliloquies: if you talk too much US+ deactivates the microphone for a few seconds. Presenting itself as an ironic tool for optimization, productivity and generating success in online conversations, US+ probably aims at exasperating an ordinary mechanism: the total reliance on proprietary software for our everyday communication. We could potentially change or turn them off at any time, but we allow their presence in our continuous communication flow even in this intrusive and paradoxical way. Chiara Ciociola
