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.
Una rete intelligente, in grado di compiere ricerche ed elaborare le info rmazioni seguendo una logica. Questo lo scenario che sembra affacciarsi all’orizzonte della ricerca sui linguaggi di programmazione prefigurato da visionari delle reti come Tim Berners Lee ma sognato, quanto temuto, da tutti i netsurfers. Sul treno dell’evoluzione in corsa verso la nascita di un web semantico sono saltati anche Martin Kuenz e Karsten Asshauer menti di triple-double-u.com. Assioma della filosofia che guida il progetto la capacità di analizzare le informazioni presenti in rete e, attraverso una serie di passaggi logici, riutilizzarle per la gestione di dati. Da una costola del progetto è nata Mailia, risponditore automatico in grado di gestire la posta elettronica. Si tratta di un software articolato e flessibile come un prodotto open source che apre i messaggi di posta in arrivo, ne analizza il contenuto e, dopo aver ricercato attraverso Google contenuti adatti ad elaborare una riposta pertinente, rispedisce il messaggio al mittente. Se il contenuto del messaggio può essere reso pubblico, viene aggiunto ad una sorta di database semantico dal quale verrà ripescato ogni volta che occorrerà produrre contenuti analoghi. Se da un lato la possibilità prefigurate da collegamenti telematici di qualunque genere e un’inedita forma del contenuto Web alimentano i sogni sull’A.I., dall’altro riaccendono il fuoco della polemica fra Apocalittici e Integrati di inizio millennio impegnati nel tentativo di ridefinire le relazioni individuali con l’inorganico e nel trovare la chiave di volta, la risposta definitiva a quella domanda che già Pascal e Leibniz si ponevano: “Può una macchina pensare?”
