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.
Despite fashion often being considered superficial, limited to windows and glossy magazines, it must also be recognized that it has always been a forerunner and spokesman for certain cultural trends and evolutions of the generational history of human society. We could say that fashion reflects the civilization in which it is immersed, indeed, from which it emerges. On the hot topic of invasion of privacy, the American fashion designer Adam Harvey has presented the first anti-spy collection in London, entitled Stealth Wear. The clothes, made in collaboration with his colleague Johanna Bloomfield, are lightweight, breathable and thanks to the highly metallic fibers that compose them, they function as a shield against the thermal sensors of drones, small unmanned aircraft, and other high-tech agents in the growing surveillance arena. The idea might also be funny were it not for the controversy sparked in many countries over the increasingly widespread use of domestic unarmed drones for surveillance purposes. Although the drones prove useful for tracing explosives, solving kidnappings, organizing relief efforts following natural disasters or crashes, the spate of accidents in foreign anti-terrorist missions that have sometimes involved the loss of innocent lives has brought strong condemnation from privacy advocates and has split public opinion in two. Adam Harvey, who has previously dealt with privacy issues in other works such as CV Dazzle, is back with this mini-collection, partly inspired by Muslim dress. On display are an anti-drone burqa, scarf and hoodie, a t-shirt that blocks X-rays and Off Pocket a mobile phone case that absorbs signal, making it impossible to locate. Although the intention of the artist is to demonstrate the fallibility of blind faith in technology, there may be some who believe that these clothes, if used improperly, might help to facilitate certain forms of illegality.
Benedetta Sabatini
Stealth Wear: The ‘Anti-Drone’ Hoodie
© 2013 Adam Harvey / ahprojects.com
Items for sale through shop.ahprojects.com Bitcoin Store (opening June 2013)
