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.
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13:05:02 Censored by net art of Knowbotic Research.
The work of net art of Swiss Knowbotic Research ' Minds of Concern: Breaking News 'has been taken offline by the host provider on May 10, because accused of carrying out any unauthorized surveillance. The work was exhibited in the exhibition Open_Source_Art_Hack ( see ) and was equipped with a port scanner, a software that pointed out the vulnerability of some communication ports belonging to hundreds of servers of non-governmental organizations and media activists all over the world , then making the results anonymously. Users, in practice, was shown the possible vulnerability of their server along with indications of some ways to take advantage of it, warning the respective managers of the dangers they could encounter. The managers of the providers that have prevented the use of the work, with a gesture, however arbitrary as a court of the United States said port scanning legal unwittingly have done nothing that emphasize the character of the work, ie the voltage increasing control between public and private control of the network, as well as dark areas within which to enter the museums when they come into work involving the network. Christian Hübler, one of the members of the Knowbotic Research said "We consulted a lawyer, simply because we wanted to know in what situation we were. When we work artistically to the limits, at least we know what should be the ultimate limit allowed." In fact, the position taken by the museum, submissive to the will of the service provider, is losing a major opportunity to offer a paradox and running by the blatant contradiction, that is, as a tool of recognition may have been turned into a tool politician. And if one of the roles of art is to reflect on the contemporary contradictions, this was an excellent opportunity to do so without harming anyone.
