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.
In the “Data Shop” installation, lots of colored tin cans are placed on shelves, similar to those normally used in supermarkets, perfectly ordered by colour in columns, as if they were encased in a structured matrix. The graphics on the boxes identify different contents, consisting of personal data of the artists downloaded from different online services. The red tin, Data Spam, contains those downloaded from google Takeout. In the green Data Salad, there are data extracted from credit card transactions. The blue one, Data Soup, collects data extrapolated from Facebook profiles. The conceptual operation made by the artistic duo Varvara & Mar clearly cites illustrious and irreverent symbolic operations. For example, in opposition to Life Sharing of 0100101110101101.ORG, in this case all the personal data are locked and made inaccessible rather than transparently available to all. The use of real personal data by artists, is also an explicit reference to the Merde d’Artist by Piero Manzoni: the hermetically closed boxes have value as they contain an appendix of the authors, physical in one case and digital in the other. But if the personal data that we give up now with lightness and habit, are like our DNA, what can be their value on a supermarket shelf? How to withdraw them from the market? What is their expiry date? Did the ability to extract them, store them on a hardware device and store them in an airtight box, make them really new to us? Or perhaps this obsessive ordered arrangement in anonymous shelves expresses a desperate aesthetic attempt to represent almost symbolic possession? Chiara Ciociola
