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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04.12.03 The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice.
Sometimes, grafting concepts one on top of another can clarify, or at least correlate, complex relations between the different points of view from which a set of data can be critically examined. The Conceptual Crisis of Private Property as a Crisis in Practice, by Robert Luxemburg, merges the paradoxes of bodylessness and the possibilities of their obfuscation in an artifact which can cast a light on several different problems at once. In a single screenshot, in fact, the author encrypted the whole content of the massive novel ‘Cryptonomicon’ by Neal Stephenson and, in this image, there are several elements, none of which was chosen randomly: a background by Jon Haddock, an artist who reconstructs famous photos with the perspectives and techniques of a videogame, the video ‘Burn Hollywood Burn’, by a.s.ambulanzen, the unauthorized .pdf version of ‘Empire’, by Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, as well as the icons of the applications used by the author, taken from the dock of mac os x. All the materials fall on the fine border between fair use and illegality, between legal and illegal digital material, a challenge to the american laws which are trying to obfuscate it even more. The possibility of ‘hiding’ an information inside another intersects the technical field with the political and legal ones, turning into a contemporary comprehensive collection of the means of reproduction and manipulation of data, impossible to regulate with traditional techniques of protection. Thus, this image synthesizes a manifesto of the endless duplicability of digital information and, at the same time, of its invincible ability to spread and manipulate real-world artifacts, making it immune to any kind of censorship.
