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.
Wiley, ISBN-13: 978-1119453017, English, 136 pages, 2019, UK
This issue of AD is a timely one and a visual feast to understand an ‘architecture without people’ which is “made for and by our machines”, in Young’s words. It is extremely well edited and developed around a solid concept, epitomised by the data centre. The aesthetic appeal of the latter has been explored by various artists over the past decade, including Ivar Veermäe in his “Crystal Computing (Google Inc., St. Ghislain)”, and Stéphane Degoutin and Gwenola Wagon in their “World Brain”, but its importance has grown over time. The vast insignificance of the places hosting them, and the enormous importance of the immense amount of data stored there, as Young defines it, is a “portrait of human history”, which is fascinatingly portrayed in John Gerrard’s photographs. The issue focuses on “productive engagement with the nonhuman world” and includes some stellar contributions: The post-anthroposcene of Benjamin Bratton, Trevor Paglen’s images that “look at us”, Adam Harvey’s Hyphen-Labs “HyperFace“ scarfs, designed to fool facial recognition, the autonomous algorithms moving walls of containers in Geoff Manaugh’s account and Xingzhe Liu photographs of Sichuan’s Bitcoin mines, among others, perfectly depict these ‘machine landscapes’ with all the striking contradictions attached. This issue is meant to be a conceptual atlas, and this is exactly what it accomplishes.
