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.
Avete mai provato a dare la paghetta ad un software spendaccione? È quello che hanno fatto gli artisti del collettivo anglo-svizzero !Mediengruppe Bitnik, sguinzagliando un bot di shopping online su Agora Market Place, uno dei mercati più floridi del deep-web. Con un budget di 100 dollari in Bitcoin a settimana e la libertà di scegliere tra più di 16.000 oggetti legali e non, il risultato non poteva che essere controverso, tanto da meritare una mostra presso il Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, in Svizzera, chiamata The Darknet: Da Memes a Onionland. Un paio di jeans Diesel falsi, 200 sigarette Chesterfield di contrabbando, un berretto da baseball con una telecamera nascosta, 10 pasticche di ecstasy… questi sono parte degli oggetti fatti recapitare dal bot direttamente presso la mostra, in cui lo schema di massima sembra mutuato dal precedente Amazon Random Shopper di Darius Kazemi. La stazione di polizia a pochi metri dalla sala espositiva non pare interessarsi agli oggetti illegali esposti, eppure è un caso che il progetto Random Darknet Shopper sia andato in porto, scampando all’operazione dell’FBI che ha recentemente chiuso alcuni mercati on line del tutto simili ad Agora Market Place. Questo intervento, unitamente alla mostra, ha sollecitato discussioni sia riguardo l’effettiva sicurezza e anonimato della rete TOR, sia riguardo il dibattito legale che si pone in mezzo ad un ginepraio di legislazioni. In una rete aperta, che comprende così tante giurisdizioni diverse, diventa molto difficile capire quali leggi siano applicabili; quali merci siano effettivamente illegali, a partire dal Paese di appartenenza dell’acquirente o del venditore. Benedetta Sabatini
!Mediengruppe Bitnik erklärt Random Darknet Shopper @ :digital brainstorming
