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.
Gli artisti Ethan Miller e Ethan Ham hanno creato una installazione nello Schneider Museum of Art, presso la University of Southern Oregon, che trasforma l’università stessa, almeno temporaneamente, in University of Jefferson. L’installazione si chiama ‘The Virtual State of Jefferson’. L’opera è (anche) una riflessione poetica sul desiderio degli abitanti della zona di fondare un (nuovo) cinquantunesimo stato degli Stati Uniti: lo stato di Jefferson. Appena prima della Seconda Guerra Mondiale, questo movimento separatista è stato molto vicino a raggiungere il suo obiettivo ma Pearl Harbor ne ha distrutto le possibilità, disperdendone le energie. Il sogno dello stato di Jefferson, tuttavia, non è mai realmente svanito. Gli artisti danno a questo vecchio movimento separatista un nuovo vigoroso impulso, rendendo lo stato di Jefferson una reale zona di frontiera, se visto però attraverso gli occhi dei motori di ricerca. ‘The Virtual State of Jefferson’ è una di quelle (belle) opere crossover che unisce arte concettuale, attivismo artistico e software art. Tecnicamente si basa su un ‘upside-down-(In)ternet’, un ‘hack’ leggero creato una volta da qualcuno che non amava che i suoi vicini accedessero alla sua rete wireless. Chiunque acceda al router viene reindirizzato attraverso un server, il quale esegue un software che cambia l’aspetto del browser. Nel caso di ‘The Virtual State of Jefferson’ la parola ‘Jefferson’ si sostituisce automaticamente a tutte le occorrenze delle parole ‘Oregon’ e ‘California’. I reality hacks sono i miei preferiti. Rivelano le trappole della percezione, oscurata dal torbido sovrapporsi dei mondi online e offline. Noi crediamo nei nostri motori di ricerca, attraverso cui navighiamo fiduciosi. Finché non ci imbattiamo in un risultato “a testa in giù”, raramente dubitiamo di loro. Questo è il perchè, quando navighiamo nel Museo di Arte Schneider, Redding California diventa Redding Jefferson. Solamente, ci fa immaginare il futuro dei mezzi di informazione.
Josephine Bosma
