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.
In the darkness our sense of place, space and time diminish and we are as lost as we are free to navigate. We are like particles adrift and while we may not require darkness to remind us, the LED-implanted synthetic spheres utilized in this installation by Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi do just this. As the spheres track downward, along a multi-tiered, figure-8 shaped microrail track [7.5 x 8 meter] structure, a variety of patterns ephemerally emerge from the darkness. With the lights off, our perception of dimension constantly shifts without axis. The track is invisible and the spheres appear to be floating as the installation turns the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media [YCAM] into a space with the darkness of a cave. The patterns generated appear abstract and adimensional, enticing visitors try to find connections or a semblance of geometric order in a similar manner to how our ancestors gazed at the stars for navigation. As the balls are asynchronously released from the top, any number of the spheres may appear illuminated at any one time. The patterns, however, change using algorithmic calculation based on specifically embedded sensors spaced out along the track. At times an axis is detectable and while the spheres appear to float aimlessly they maintain a sense of [spatial] unification when luminescent. With the special ‘control points’ along the rail and an embedded infrared sensor, the position of a sphere is transmitted as data which a central computer processes to regulate the luminescence of each sphere as well as the soundtrack generated- one akin to the oscillation of a cicada swarm. When the spheres have completed the track, they are carried up via a discreet conveyor belt system much like a bowling alley. As we wander through the installation in the dark, the temporally cohesive patterns that emerge as the particles appear and reappear generate the ideas of randomness and pattern identification at an unlikely and ambiguous intersection. The installation continues to reset itself, drawing us closer to experience the physical and spatial sensations of a twenty-first century digital cave.
Vicente Gutierrez
