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.
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04.03.03 Metapod digital arts festival.
On February 27 opened in Birmingham (UK) the third Metapod digital arts festival, which brings in this city the works commissioned by the BitParts FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology) of Liverpool. Among the exhibited works are: ‘The Intimator’, a sound sculpture by Herwig Weiser, formed by an array of glass tubes containing magnetic substances dynamically manipulated through sound sources fished from the Internet; ‘Internet Exploder’, an interactive installation by Group 7 which, according to the urls typed in by the user, lays a page on top of the others blackening the screen and posing conceptual doubts on our ways of collecting and processing the information ‘T(oy)ime Machine’, by Darryl Georgiou, a new/old media installation where an array of old interfaces (hand levers, buttons, etc.) brings to memory fragments of television characters, sounds, objects and soundtracks from the past; ‘Flatlanders’, by Lewis Paul, a video whose filming techniques are coupled with those of the BMX bycicles fans, with technically considerable results; ‘I, Robot (Phase 2)’, by James Coupe & Hedley Roberts, an installation of collaborative and autonomous robots which interact with the visitors through terminals, trying to comprehend the world around them from a human viewpoint; ‘Dead Media?’, by the group Funding Pending, a work recycling an archive of 1000 obsolete videotapes covering a thirty years period. Among the musical performances, the one by Brian Duffy (together with Kaffe Matthews) stands out. He’s a local musician who plays his Modified Toy Orchestra, made of abandoned toys from the Eighties and Nineties, wired and modified so as to become tiny electronic musical instruments. Completing the festival are workshops and seminaries involving the artists.
