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.
CD – Coda
The project Early Modern Infrared by the Italian duo Dahaka is a stereo combination of modified recordings of a scanning infrared camera and fragmented early modern music taken from the period in which the subject paintings were made. This is a classic example of some contemporary artistic ways of working, which tries to search for a strong relationship between the digital and history. According to this process, the idea overlooks the aesthetic result. This does not mean that the original idea has no importance in the creative process, but that first there is the thought of a precise musical structure and only later the work-making process can begin. Infrared Radiography is a technique for studying the underlying layers of a painting with the help of a detector that is sensitive to Infrared radiation. So too, the formal structure of the paintings under examination provides some general indications about the music, which will be later chosen among the music typical of the same age the painting belongs to. We have the metaphor of a deep scan, here the artist is still the one in charge for the definitive version (in this case the chamber parts are kept to a minimum and the full set of pulses, hisses, scratches and glitches is more redundant). The result is fascinating; the hypnosis due to the repeated and synthetic recordings are contrasted by some measured classical parts. The continuum of one hour and ten minutes gradually engages the listener. The dark materials such as charcoal absorb the infrared light while light material reflects it, and different wave lengths penetrate to different layers of the painting, revealing various parts of the underlying layers. All the recordings are made by using some scanned images and the cover artwork is a multispectral infrared scan of a detail of Ciamabue’s Madonna with Child (1283) in Castelfiorentino, while the back cover and the picture on the other side of the inlay are details of The Entombment (1507) by Raffaello in Galleria Borghese, Rome. The Dahaka meticulously assembled all the data they collected. The work is fully engaging and the beauty of the final result is so high as to allow us to forget the complexity of the whole process.
