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.
IIE is an interactive acoustic installation through which Reinhard Gupfinger researches infrasounds, that is, those sounds that, having a frequency less than 20/16 Hertz (20/16 cycles per second), are below the audible threshold of the human ear. While the ear is insensitive to those sounds, the human body can nevertheless perceive them as vibrations. It is this possibility that the Austrian artist explores in this work, raising awareness of this relatively unknown curiosity. In fact, infrasounds are extremely common in nature, since they are emitted by atmospheric phenomena, such as thunder and wind, and by some animals (whales, elephants, etc.), which use them to communicate over distances. Road traffic and industrial machinery can also emit infrasounds in some circumstances. The abundance of low frequencies in the environment stimulates a reflection to reaffirm their importance in contemporary culture. Moving towards that goal, it is clear how this project can be interpreted as an attempt to rescue the human senses from the perceptive monopoly of noise and make them aware of those sounds that, albeit inaudible, are no less important in our daily soundscape.To reach his goal, Gupfinger built an installation that puts together quite diverse elements, including a 250 inch long organ pipe, a wind power generator and a video-tracking interface for multiuser interaction. Thanks to such a system, the public can not only perceive the infrasounds created during the performance, but can also interact with them: the users’ movements in the surrounding space control (through the video-tracking system) the wind power generator that blows into the organ pipe, varying the volume and pitch of the sounds. In practise, the users can affect the sounds being generated through their movements, increasing their awareness of infrasounds.
Vito Campanelli
