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.
book – NTT Publishing Co. – ISBN 4757170270
Summarizing fifteen years of (new) media art is no easy task, neither for an exhibition, nor for a writer. If we discard the ambitions to encompass everything and the pretenses of absolute objectivity, what’s left is a serious work of investigation and a hard selective task. Fumihiko Sumitomo and Yukiko Shikata attempted it for the InterCommunication Center of Tokyo, elaborating a journey structured on the radical evolution of electronic art starting from 1989, a year when the omens of a drastic change in culture and society were very strong. The result is one of the many possible courses, put in a historical context by an event and a static paper publication, characterized by five keywords chosen to represent the phenomenon (Time, Space, Body, Public, Generative) and by a chronology where technology, theory, art works and art exhibitions flow side by side. These things can be different keys of interpretation of media art, which can be centered on the evolution of technical possibilities, or on the periodical birth of innovative thesis, or on the ideas embodied in sensational works, or on the transversal concepts systematized by the most important exhibitions. Any of these cultural routes highlights some characters of this phenomenon and forgets others, preferring a specific reading, sometimes even sectional, but always interconnected with other ambits. The links with the past are fundamental to dispel a self-referential nature that, even if ingrained in technology, is the last hurdle to overcome to bring electronic culture into the wider-ranging contemporaneity.
