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.
usb – merles
Jocelyn Robert, a Canadian multidisciplinary experimenter, allows himself to be guided by the suggestions offered by Audiometaphor and Calliope, two software programs developed by Metacreation Lab. The former is a generative system based on prompts for the creation of soundscapes, the latter a support architecture that makes generative artificial intelligence more accessible for artistic purposes. What emerges is an album comprised of eleven pieces in the ‘modern classical’ style, mostly with a piano foundation, tinged with sparse field recordings and occasional, but significant, volume variations, artfully managed between the different components. It is not easy to distinguish by listening alone which musical parts are created by software, or how these sounds were subsequently reorganised. The suspicion is that the most musical parts are born from algorithms, yet this is not a particularly decisive concern within the context of simple fruition, or in understanding how artificial intelligence can or should contribute to the development of new musical forms. The shadows alluded to in the album title are perhaps the same ones that loom over our present time, preventing us from imagining new scenarios and from breaking out of the patterns of specific musical genres. Ultimately even the most sophisticated AI system is designed to understand and generate texts similar to those already created by humans. Value remains in objects, in reality, in the space-time relationship – creativity has always been enabled by the artifacts that define each era. In short, there is no dehumanisation for the benefit of technology because the boundaries between man and artificial intelligence remain uncertain – one is the shadow of the other, and vice versa. It is an exchange that for now is the foresight of new procedures and instances, one that we cannot fully define in this moment. Jocelyn Robert takes a pragmatic approach to the disappearance of reality – the garden of shadows is nothing but a new reality, which modulates preferences, tastes and imagination, and take shape here in a fascinating sound journey in tune with the spectacle of contemporary society, a society that is still, to all intents and purposes, one of languages.
Jocelyn Robert – un jardin d’ombres
