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.
ScratchML is a project planned by Michael Auger, Jamie Wilkinson and Kyle McDonald with the goal of creating a new markup language for encoding the musical scratches of Dj sets in realtime. Afterwards, the scratches are analyzed, re-created and shared through databases. During the Brooklyn Hack Day 2012 the first prototypes of this project were developed by the planners together with other programmers and artists. The tools used included a timecode vynil, a VCA fader (modified) and an Arduino device. The scratches of each participant are saved in the (new) format .sml. Transmitting the scratches through OSC (Open Sound Control, a format for the transmission of contents through computers, sound synthesizers and other multimedia devices), a Dj is now finally able to save all their scratches in realtime. Collected in the ScratchML.com database, the .sml files can be freely uploaded and downloaded for use in live sets, with information about the required hard/software modifications also available. The project also spawned the creation of the .gml language, an universal and “open” file format based on XML; the language was originally projected to encode the movements of graffiti artists according to spacial and temporal coordinates. The Graffiti Markup language has many applications: for example, a mechanical robot arm able to create graffiti like a sophisticated artist. The options and the potentialities of ScratchML (a meta-tool indeed) are basically the same as the Graffiti Markup Language. As a result, the idea comes to mind that in the future audiences may witness a live super robot Dj performing a set of unheard remixes of tracks in .sml format.
Chiara Ciociola
