Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
Chiunque abbia vissuto a New York negli ultimi mesi potrebbe comunque essere ignaro delle Stranger Visions di Heather Dewey-Hagborg. Questo è un progetto che esaspera il concetto di sorveglianza, permettendo così di insinuarsi nella nostra sfera più intima e privata: il nostro profilo genetico. L’artista è stata impegnata nel raccogliere capelli, mozziconi di sigarette e chewing-gum dagli angoli delle strade e negli spazi pubblici, prima di estrarne il DNA e inserire i dati ottenuti in un software in grado di ricostruire la forma facciale dei proprietari del materiale organico. Utilizzando una stampante 3D, Heather Dewey-Hagborg ha trasformato quei residui in sculture ritratto realistiche. Questo gesto provocatorio pone la questione dell’estrema facilità d’individuazione e di manipolazione delle informazioni genetiche di un individuo: ognuno di noi continuamente lascia attorno tracce biologiche che sono molto facili da rubare. È parte della nostra natura come soggetti incarnati – non c’è alcun consenso che puoi rifiutarti di firmare, nessun modulo per la scelta di non inserire dati personali. La conservazione e la manipolazione dell’informazione genetica è una realtà che oggi ha implicazioni pratiche in attività mediche di scienza e medicina forense. Stranger Visions è timorosa dell’involuzione di questa realtà in uno scenario che sembra fantascienza ma è già drammaticamente a noi quotidiano, uno scenario in cui è assai facile implementare il più radicale dei furti di identità: determinismo genetico e clonazione assieme. Per la Dewey-Hagborg la situazione è estremamente delicata, tanto che sul suo blog esprime dubbi circa il rilascio open source del software utilizzato per ricostruire i volti: immaginatene i possibili usi!
Ylenia Cafaro
Stranger Visions, Somatic Traces Of DNA
