Microposts

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.

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.”

 

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

 

Kickended by Silvio Lorusso is online database artwork archiving the Kickstarted campaigns that got not even a single penny. This competitive aesthetics of failure has been able to attract the attention of major national newspapers (from the British “The Guardian” to the Italian “Corriere della Sera”).

 

The Pirate Bay computers and servers have been seized by Swedish Police on a data center in Nacka (Greater Stockholm). It’s offline since December 9. http://torrentfreak.com/swedish-police-raid-the-pirate-bay-site-offline-141209/

Art Post-Internet” was an exhibition curated by Karen Archey and Robin Peckham for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing in spring 2014. This is the specially designed pdf catalogue whose with the front page is created each time with the IP and quite approximated location of the user. It includes tentatively definition of “post-internet” by Cory Arcangel, Simon Denny, and Bunny Rogers, art critics Ben Davis and Paddy Johnson, academics Mark Tribe and Esther Choi, and museum professionals Christiane Paul, Raffael Dörig, Jamillah James, Ben Vickers, Omar Kholeif and Gene McHugh.