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.
At the beginning of 20th century Eastman introduced the No. 1 Kodak camera with the catchy slogan “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest”, and revolutionized photography by providing the public a photo device that was easy to use. With Nadia, the smart camera designed by German artist Andrew Kupresanin, it feels like this intention is pushed into becoming a paradox. Users don’t even have to look at the shot as Nadia does not display the photographs to be taken. The screen only shows an aesthetic quality rating percentage that informs the user about when and what to snap. To do so Nadia utilizes AQUINE, the first publicly available aesthetics inference engine, which is supposed to give “intelligent, unbiased and instant assessment of photos”. It is described as a machine-learning based online system for computer-based prediction of aesthetic quality for colour natural photographic pictures. It is a fact that progress will lead to systems able to think creatively and infer beauty. What Kupresanin is questioning is what effect this will have on individual preferences and our creative process? Are we going to become lazy conformists? In their most recent publication the AQUINE team say simply that: “We leave aside subjectivity for now and consider aesthetic attributes to be a consensus measure over the entire population” (Datta et al 2008). So although the researchers acknowledged early on that semantics play a part, they couldn’t include their dynamic nature, or the quite profound differences that can exist between the perceptions of different groups and individuals. To be fair this is a route a research team has to follow, as a complex semantics comes as a result of research, not as its premise. However the output of aesthetics without semantics has some of the characteristics of stock market trading programs that make the same judgment at the same time and therefore all contribute to mutual collapse when the system tips out of balance. This is what Kupresanin is highlighting and worrying about: the dualism between creativity and conformism is a risk our society faces if we stick to the surface of things. Semantic, subjectivity and context are intrinsic to the creation of beauty.
Valentina Culatti
