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.
Building on the concept of typing, understood the double meaning discursive and gestural, Casey Reas creates Dakadaka software interactive visual representation of the keys pressed on the keyboard. The interface is the grid of positional typographic system, on which the signs constituting the langue are arranged in a rigid manner. However the percussion rhythmic, fast and continuous of the fingers, physical action in space, generates an unexpected words, because processed by the software, which makes the mutant image on a display abstract and dynamic. The project carried out together with Golan Levin , an artist and fellow student all'Aestethics and Computation Group at MIT led by John Maeda, is consistent with the survey conducted by reas on limited interactive capabilities of the software still in use, in which the interface static, based on a system of icons real estate, creates frustration in the user. The idea is to build computer systems that are able to react quickly to external inputs. In this case the concepts and desires that users want to express, temporarily encoded through the alphabetic language, take on new form and come to life at the very moment in which the code is executed, in a sort of inter-semiotic translation. This type of reflection has the merit of shifting attention to the code as a basic element of every digital research. The code is executing a set of instructions which the machine operates, but viewed from the standpoint of software art is in itself a ground for creative practice. The contemporary artists working in a state of abundance of the code and the spread of the language automatically makes sure that the attraction to formal writing defiles herself with new demands subjective. The same Reas said: 'I need to code to make the work I desire'. However, as the software becomes more specific, the more increases the feeling that using it will penetrate the imagination of those who created it. And this is the case Dakadaka, software to interact with in the context of an installation closed and not open source in the public space of the network.
