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.
The University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-1517909956, English, 330 pages, 2022, USA
In 1962, an exhibition entitled “Arte Programmata: Arte Cinetica, Opere Moltiplicate, Opera Aperta” (Programmed Art: Kinetic Art, Multiple Works, Open Work), curated by Giorgio Soavi and Bruno Munari, opened at the Olivetti Showroom in Milan. Arte Programmata in Italy was the outcome of a series of pioneering processes that converged in a symbolic space. It took place a few years before the now famous exhibitions Cybernetic Serendipity (1968) and Information (1970). Among the many studios, laboratories and institutions in Europe that used computer technology as a potential tool for cultural and social change in the 1960s, Arte Programmata developed into a truly interdisciplinary movement, attracting various avant-garde groups (such as the renown Gruppo T and Gruppo N), designers and theorists to collaborate. Olivetti, the brand that anticipated the personal computer and had a CEO who cared deeply about a fairer organisation of work and the social consequences of technology and design, was the perfect place at the time to think about “freedom” vs. “control” from a cybernetic perspective. This topic turns out to be a very timely debate today. Caplan gives justice to it, with a carefully reconstructed history, focusing on the political dimension and context in which the left, Eco’s “open work”, and early computer art, flourished in the same spaces.
