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.
YouGlitch is a website created by Martial Geoffre-Rouland and Benjamin Gaulon, based on Corrupt, their web-based Glitch Art Software. Corrupt, built back in 2004 with Proce55ing, enables the corruption of image files through repetitive replacements that can lead to numerous corrupted versions. The process is simple and clear: after users download and install the software, they can use it with webcam videos or ones they have stored on their hard disk. A 10-second video and an animated GIF is saved locally and also automatically uploaded to the new website. YouGlitch is a user-generated collection of glitch creativity. It is based on re-using, recycling, creatively destroying and sharing. It is a collective glitch art project but on its own terms and in accordance with our social media reality. At first sight, YouGlitch doesn’t seem to present accidents or failures as part of a flow or circulation of images. It looks more like a tool for helping users demystify glitch art, opening it up to popularization. It appears as a user-generated aesthetization of interruption that proves (as Rosa Menkman wrote in her Glitch Studies Manifesto) that what is now a glitch is destined to become a fashion. But to my eyes, YouGlitch succeeds on deeper levels: it connects to the present while referring to the past. It correlates the digital with the analogue era by correlating YouTube channels with the TV. It raises questions regarding potentially deliberate failures in the stream of videos and the exercise of control. Could it be that YouGlitch allows for collective play with corruption while at the same time suggesting a form of sabotage? If glitch art can also constitute a form of subversion, couldn’t this project possibly also be about the formation of an anti-apparatus that is unreadable, profane, glitched, out of control?
Daphne Dragona
