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.
Is media art the retirement home for obsolete technologies? Liberated from the alienating effects of usefulness, our throwaway consumer electronic devices sometimes find a new life only after being replaced by a newer generation of gadgets. Stephen Cornford has been digging into this line of thought in a series of works in which he offers old recording technologies a chance to finally express their own true nature. In his Five Introverted Machines he detached the tape head of first generation cassette players and used them to amplify the electromagnetic emissions generated by the electronics of the cassette player itself. In Binatone Galaxy he probed the interior acoustic space of the audio cassette, amplifying the resonances of the plastic container removed of its original magnetic spool. In Conford’s latest work Migration, a large number of modified cassette tape dictaphones loosely imitate the aural presence of a flock of birds. His voice recorders amplify noises produced by their own internal mechanics, sounds which during the conventional life cycle of the product were repressed by diligent audio engineers as unwanted interference. The speakers are removed from the body of the devices and attached to pendulums whose oscillation is periodically refreshed by the transport mechanisms originally assembled to carry the magnetic stripe past the play-head. Visually, the work produces an effect reminiscent of György Ligeti’s piece for 100 metronomes Poeme Symphonique. Conford reminds us how technologies for fixing sound have gradually migrated from the mechanical to the electronic domain. If the self-noise of SD memory cards beats the obsolete medium of tape recorders in terms of quietness, SD memory cards might have less to say once their turn comes to retire. Matteo Marangoni
Migration
