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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14.04.03 Software Art.net, Switch n.18 and Making Art on the Web.
Software programmed not for productive purposes, but aesthetical, social and conceptual, is becoming more and more important in the electronic art scene. Like any avant-garde movement, however, it needs in-depth studies and discussions to define its theoretical aspects, still very blurred. To this end, it’s worth reading the long and extremely interesting transcription of the public debate which marked the opening of the site Software Art.net, supervised by Inke Arns (a co-founder of the Syndicate and Spectre mailing lists). During the opening day, at the Media Arts Lab of the KŸnstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, several renowned exponents of this scene (Florian Cramer, Pit Schulz, Amy Alexander, Sally Jane Norman, Adrian Ward, Diana McCarthy…) made deep contributions on subjects like the definition of software art and its aesthetic and social implications. The latest number (18) of the online magazine ‘Switch’, about new media culture, too, is dedicated to software intended as cultural production, and its different aspects (interface, interactivity, poetics) are analyzed with the help of a contribution by Tim O’Reilly, the famous ‘enlightened’ publisher. Also interesting is the difference between ‘default software’, that is, the one deceitfully labeled as ‘official’, therefore endorsed by the biggest software houses, and its alternatives, i.e.: the one voluntarily chosen and installed by the user. On the italian front, Undo.net has put online the acts of the conference ‘Making Art on the Web‘, held at the Fondazione Pistoletto in Biella, a part of the ‘Gates/Transimages Europeennes’ project. It’s composed of a general overview and the contributions of the participants (Tatiana Bazzichelli, Pier Luigi Capucci, Mariacristina Cremaschi, Francesco Galluzzi, Claudio Parrini and Alessandro Ludovico).
