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.
. Art 
20:11:02 Glitch art, charm digital error.
Power and precision of calculation of the new computers and digital trends have greatly influenced contemporary aesthetic. In the collective imagination some cleaning and a certain patina typical image of the standard mass-media and advertising, attest to the unmatched perfection of the machine than man. In confined environments where the culture is moved from the bottom, there is a reason those who imperfection digital aesthetic that has parallels in music and image. The English term 'glitch' indicates a malfunction, error, disruption, and is generally used to indicate a small defect of electrical origin. Doing these defects of works of art has the double purpose of creating and try new aesthetic but also to reveal the limits and the non-perfection of the machine, as well as its side unpredictable and incalculable. Tony Scott works for some years now on the 'glitches' in the field of digital imaging and has made a real methodology for the production of glitch art, freely available on its website Glitch Art that is frequently updated. The creation process is quite special and interesting: it consists in forcing the program code for causing fatal errors then covertiti file in 8bit color, the next step is to show the file and then change it later through a graphical editor where you select an area of interest (not always it is interesting the whole image) and you resize it. Finally, we emphasize the contrasts and colors and sometimes mixes the resulting image on other photographic source. The final result is formed by screens with color areas in blocks simple but effective, being in contrast with other areas of noise and chaos. The site, in addition to providing general information on the 'glitch aesthetic', it works as a repository of works in progress always accompanied by notes bearing the choices and motivations of the artist.
Clement Pestelli
