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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19.02.03 Translocations, local globalities.
Translocations is an exhibition of works of network art held at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (USA), which tries to discover how the ‘local’ can survive in a naturally global system such as the Net. Supervised by Steve Dietz, the overseer of the museum’s new media department, this exhibition features nine works, all of them capable of stimulating thoughts and discussions. ‘Big [b]Other’, for instance, is a blog created by the mexican artist Fran Ilich which gathers ten artists who discuss about subjects such as the reappropriation of world space as an art form, in contrast with the concept of museum or art gallery, and which reach daring conclusions, like stating that ‘the museum is the world’. ‘Opus, Architecture for Temporary Autonomous Sarai’, by the Raqs Media Collective, too, uses the blog, but stressing the collaborative aspect of it, since every entry, be it text, a picture or a video, can be modified freely by the other participants. In ‘Translation Map’, by Warren Sack and Sawad Brooks, it’s possible to write and send emails to 250 different countries, facing the linguistic communication problems which still isolate the lesser known cultures. To obtain the translation (to a language chosen among the six thousand available), the message is first posted to the right newsgroup for that kind of bilingualism. ‘Translocal Mixer’, by the brazilian group Re:combo, is an interactive control panel for mixing sounds from Recife with sounds from Bucarest and other cities, suggesting the idea that the more the Internet becomes global, the more the local communities emphasize and try to preserve their local characteristics. Andreja Kuluncic, from Zagreb, with ‘Distributive Justice: America’, adds an important contribution to the discussion with an online game which simulates communities exchanging goods for free. The work by Julie Mehretu + entropy8zuper!, too, is controversial. The japanese Takuji Kogo, on the other hand, with ‘Fox 9 News: Non Broadcasting Time @ Twin Cities’, plays with the paradox of the place where news are produced (a Fox studio) and his empty and widely explorable vision. Speaking about control, the work by alpha 3.8, named tsunamii.net, is also interesting. These two artists, last year in Kassel, had already activated, for Documenta 11, this project, which influences the user’s browser according to the route covered on foot by the two artists, who report their location using GPS receivers.
