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.
At the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, it’s being held the 2003 edition of the Impakt Festival. ‘Music, Fashion and Politics’ is the theme of this year’s edition, to stress the young artists’ need to express themselves in the most different fields, highlighting a growing conscience for social and political issues. The attention towards new media, already manifest in the previous editions, continues with the ‘Impakt Online’ section, where six artists are sponsored to carry out their net.art projects. Among the topics discussed there are: ‘The Art of the Narrative’, with the works: ‘Village Voice’, by Ramesh Srinivasan, who once again investigates the mechanisms of oral tradition with a web interface able to merge different stories, taken from a database of stories told by somalian refugees in Boston, according to what the user is watching; ‘Beadgee’, by Tamar Schori, interleaves the visual meanings of a drawing with the textual meanings of words, in a process representing a different way to read. In the ‘Out of the Box’ section, on the other hand, there are: ‘Life, A User’s Manual: Impakt Walk’, by Michelle Teran, where, while going around the city, the author highlights the hidden cameras behind walls and shop windows, and ‘Songlines’, by the GPSter, who use GPS receivers to find the data corresponding to real locations. ‘Database Dilemma’, finally, is still open to subscriptions. In the video programme, ‘Blatant Plagiarism’, by Derek Holzer, stands out. It deals with the antagonist use of sound sampling and copyright, a concept tackled also by the scheduled speech ‘Creative Media Resistance’, by Mark Hosler of Negativland and by the radical installations by Johan Grimonprez (‘Inflight’ and ‘I’m a bit like you, I’m a bit in the clouds’). There’s also a suitable space dedicated to electronic music, with an evening performances by the Mille Plateaux and concerts by Vladislav Delay, SND and Kid 606.
