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.
Vinyl – Javier Lloret
Dating from 1985, WordNet is a semantic-lexical database for the English language, a hierarchical classification system describing the world, inspired by the theories of human semantic memory developed at the end of 1960s. In contrast to episodic memory, semantic memory is not personal, but is shared by all the people speaking the same language. The lexical organization is based on some groups of words with similar meanings, called synsets, basically nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs bundled in sets of synonyms. Any group expresses a different concept. ImageNet derives from this concept and consists of a data-set of images based on the same hierarchy of nouns. Any node of the hierarchy is represented by hundreds and thousands of images. From 2010 to 2017, the challenge for large scale visual recognition on ImageNet (ILSVRC) has been a remarkable benchmark for the classification and localization of object categories, with a huge impact on photographic and image-recognition software. 1000 synset (Vinyl Edition) includes these 1000 recorded categories of objects. Javier Lloret wants to stress the impact these data sets have when it comes to training artificial intelligence on the systems and devices we use in our daily life. It’s basically an invitation to think about them and to carefully listen to them. Every copy of the vinyl shows a different set and an image: the researchers at ILSVRC use these elements to train their models. Once again, Lloret focuses on the exploration of the transition between transparency and opacity in various mass media, an aptitude we can define as peculiar and also distinctive for a media artist. We only received the second volume, which features the synsets from 501 to 1000, introduced by a female voice and divided into two tracks lasting about 18 minutes each. The essence of semantic memory is that its contents are not tied to any particular set of experiences. What is stored in semantic memory is the “juice” of experience, an abstract structure which is possible to apply to a large variety of experiential objects and which outlines the categorical and functional relationships between such objects. So, Lloret definitely makes a conceptual operation with this project, but at the same time introduces didactic veins.
