Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
Mo H. Zareei’s ”Material Music” features eight kinetic sound-sculptures made of an electromechanical actuator striking identical blocks of different solid materials, respectively brass, copper, aluminium, steel, hardwood, softwood, glass, and marble. The shifts in striking time are calculated through phase-shifting →
Il cordyceps è un fungo parassita che si innesta negli insetti nutrendosene. Project Alias, di Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, è un simile “parassita” per gli home device, che può essere personalizzato per controllare i propri smart assistant tutelando la →
The golden era of electronic art produced not only primordial generative artworks, screen manipulations and electronic music, but also a few custom-hardware-based sculptures, of which only a small number have been preserved. Eirik Brandal has an interest in such artefacts, →
There is growing criticism of the widespread application of machine-based recognition and data processing, especially those involving visual technologies. The inaccuracy, tolerated as a minority, is second only to the political consequences of the applied criteria. Francis Hunger & Flupke →
In Michael Sedbon’s “CMD”, two artificial ecosystems, made by sets of photosynthetic bacteria, share a light source, the access to which is granted through a ‘market’. A genetic algorithm optimises the market rules. Each bacterial colony can claim access to →
Al centro dell’installazione “*(asterisk)” c’è quel che sembra una mela. Incastrata dentro una sfera armillare, la mela ruota di continuo a 360°, inquadrata da telecamere che scansionano al millimetro la sua superficie. Quattro monitor posizionati intorno all’ingranaggio mostrano in tempo →
Nathalie Gebert’s “On Framing Textile Ambiguities” is an excellent work using textile as both medium and metaphor, and focusing on thread, for its “emancipatory potential”. It inevitably mentions the famous Jacquard loom, as an ancestor of computing systems, and associated →
“If only these walls could talk” we use to say when we are denied the acknowledgement of a situated past, and there’s nobody around who can support it. This concept seems admirably rendered by Nadav Assor in “Stone Tape”, a →
If we were able to invisibly occupy a sculptural exhibition with our eyes closed, what kind of sounds would we hear and have resonate in our minds? Natalia Domínguez Rangel’s “Overlap” is an artwork that works to answer this question. →
In the early days of the web, public webcams situated outside allowed for the ‘globalisation of time in your own bedroom’ for the very first time. The confluence of different times flowing on the screen split our sense of presence, →
