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.
What digital life forms are still hiding in the folds of virtual worlds, living an unseen life that is still animated by code? And what do they represent from a sociological perspective in our digital anthropomorphic ecosystem? These are questions that easily arise before Hardly Working, a work developed as part of the EMAP/EMARE framework by the artist collective Total Refusal, which defines itself as a “pseudo-marxist media guerilla”. Produced as a 4-channel video installation and subsequently as a film, Hardly Working focuses on so-called non-playable characters (NPCs), the video game characters who are not part of the game dynamics and script, but who are nonetheless integrated, often in loops, into the game scenario to reinforce its reality and details. Their digital identity is barely perceptible as they are relegated to the background of the players’ attention and to the periphery of the game system’s structure. The collective instead places them at the centre of the stage, in the spotlight, and analyses their repetitive movements in detail. The four main characters (a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper and a handyman) are referred to as “Sisyphus machines”, alluding to the Greek myth of Sisyphus, condemned to push a huge stone uphill for eternity only to experience its inevitable descent. Their existential status is undoubtedly similar: eternally trapped in loops that can be viewed from different perspectives. The irony that speaks from the narrative voice should not detract from the value of the digital ethnography critically presented here. In a supposedly political gesture, the social economy of these characters and the balance of power they represent in their virtual worlds symbolises how marginal workers have historically been demoted by capitalist society. Their repetitive gestures, repeated for hours on end, no longer produce a particular good, as on the physical assembly line, but they serve a different and still depersonalising purpose: they make the visual landscape more believable and detailed, acting like pointlessly working human tapestries with a live encoded spirit.
Total Refusal: Hardly Working (Excerpt)
