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.
Da quando la vita apparve sulla Terra, per cause più o meno conosciute, si sono verificate diverse estinzioni di massa ‐ vi ricordate i dinosauri? Molti scienziati considerano l’enorme riduzione della biodiversità che stiamo registrando in questi anni, come l’origine di un’altra estinzione di massa. La Sesta. Presenti in tutto il Mondo per oltre 650 milioni di anni senza essere mai a rischio di estinzione, le meduse (sembra che alcune specie siano potenzialmente immortali), rappresentano l’archivio evolutivo perfetto; racchiudono simbolicamente i più antichi pensieri umani sulla vita eterna e dunque, sul futuro. Il miglioramento delle condizioni di vita in un mondo tecnologicamente avanzato ci permette di condurre un’esistenza significativamente più lunga rispetto al passato. Ma qual’è il limite a cui tendere? La ricerca dell’immortalità (o più fattibilmente della longevità) si scontra oggi con le possibilità realmente offerte dalla biotecnologia di poter progettare e controllare la vita, richiedendo così una necessaria ridefinizione critica dei valori sociali. Il progetto “Aurelia + 1 Hz”, per definizione della stessa artista slovena Robertina Šebjanič che lo ha curato con la collaborazione di illustri colleghi e scienziati, affronta le possibilità di coesistenza di animali e macchine. In contrasto con i robot (sui quali l’artista ha già lavorato in passato), guidati da intelligenza artificiale digitale, il progetto utilizza organismi viventi, meduse appunto, per elaborare la “vitalità” di una macchina. Immersi nel buio, i due contenitori si fanno compagnia: nella tecnologica vasca, le meduse; nella teca da laboratorio, la macchina. Come se l’uno si mettesse nei panni dell’altro. Il risultato è a dir poco affascinante. Benedetta Sabatini
Aurelia 1+Hz / proto viva generator
