Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
La lettura delle news online, dal web alle mailing list agli ultraefficienti flussi in RSS (che permettono di avere un istantaneo colpo d’occhio generale da più fonti) è diventato un rito quotidiano che si perpetua anche più volte al giorno nell’inebriante sensazione di essere ‘collegati con ciò che succede’. Ma i tempi serratissimi di produzione e fruizione danno adito ad un consumo sfrenato e bulimico, che spesso si traduce in un’ubriacatura informativa dalla quale è difficile disintossicarsi. A giocare con questi concetti è News Reader, un programma che genera del testo relazionato a partire da una notizia. L’insieme di notizie sono attinte da Yahoo! News, ma quando si scegli di leggerle nel dettaglio si notano diversi link associati a taluni termini presenti nel corpo del testo. Questi link portano non ad ulteriore approfondimento del termine o ad un sito relativo, ma ad una ulteriore finestra dove si trova un testo generato da modelli statistici e a partire dalle news alternative di ‘Common Dreams’. L’impercettibile transito effettuato dal testo originale a quello man mano generato plasma i concetti attribuendogli un senso più netto e schierato. Il software è stato prodotto da Noah Wardrip-Fruin (autrice di The New Media Reader e First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game), David Durand, Brion Moss e Elaine Froehlich e fa parte di una coppia di programmi (l’altro si chiama Regime Change) dotati di un approccio politico alla distribuzione e alla riproduzione dei testi. L’inanellare concetti in News Reader, tramite associazioni sensate e di diverso accento rispetto al canovaccio originale, riesce ad espletare una doppia funzione: spostare il punto di vista univoco e asettico delle news dei grandi portali ed esplorare linguisticamente la scrittura delle stesse. Il risultato affascina, ma la sua migliore peculiarità consiste nell’inventare meccanicamente credibili risultati, a volte smaccatamente divertenti o visibilmente drammatici, sfruttando le catene di generazione del linguaggio per illuminarci sulla sua percezione inconscia.
