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.
The uncertainty about the nature of a writing, ie how likely it may seem despite being generated by a machine, is one of the issues raised by the text generation software. The refinement of algorithms, and consequently the results obtained, puts the test Touring (old methodology to test whether a text can be exchanged with an artificial written in his own hand by a person of flesh and blood) on a new plan, that is not conducted more as an experiment in the lab, but tested directly on social systems. this is exactly what they did Jeremy Stribling and two other friends at MIT, through Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy research work generated by SCIgen , a software programmed to automatically build essays computer science, including charts , figures and references, accessible through a web interface and free to use for all trials of the case. With great fanfare the work has been accepted to the famous WMSCI, the World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Although none of the auditors is exposed to approval, no one has even heard of fail him, passing his hand on the proceedings, and, collectively tacitly endorsing the plausibility of the script. After the uproar, the essay was ovvimanete excluded, but the authors are now trying to contact other speakers in total confidentiality, trying to rimborsagli the registration fee (obtained through a collection via the web supported by 165 anonymous donors) to have access anyway the conference and be able to perform the final act of this operation, ie a presentation of a work invented, carried out through a text which is also completely generated, read with the necessary seriousness required by the environment. These generations could produce a meta-textual whole new language, a kind of 'vocabulary of the plausible' in which, even to the ends of perfect simulation, you recognize the signs of a radical change in linguistic structures, now also of (partial) domain of the machines.
