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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18.12.03 The Classic II Exhibition, art for old Macs.
Obsolete hardware surely is a resource, both from an aesthetical, a sort of ‘vintage’, and from a historical point of view, because it testimonies the evolution of the computer industry and the intrinsical limits it faced through the years. The swedish organization Electrohype, which has given the name to a festival, has capitalized on this possibility by opening, in its gallery in Malmö, ‘The Classic II Exhibition‘, an exhibition of software art, both vintage and not, running on Apple Mac Classic II computers. The works are: ‘HyperScape’, by Richard Bolam, a software for manipulating an image on many machines, coordinating their work; ‘The Artist’s Eye’, by Torrey Nommesen, a classic subversion of the point of view, realized with an on-screen eye watching the visitors; ‘The Matrix 9×9’, by Sebastian Campion, an asynchronous matrix made with nine pictures from the movie ‘The Matrix’ reduced to black and white in a grid of nine pixels; ‘Liquid Language’, by David Rokeby, a flow of text revolving around the concept of forgetting / remembering / dreaming; ‘Classico Salz Bee Jul’, by Mogens Jacobsen, patterns generated on the screen symmetrically with respect to the position of the mouse pointer; ‘Arrow Variations – Book 1’, by John F. Simon jr., an interactive prediction of the arrow movements by playing with a few parameters; ‘ALRT#ID’, by JODI, a work inspired by the mousepad as a projection plane of the computer; ‘Auto’, by Magnus Wassborg and ‘Inferiorator’, by Toree Nilsson, in a conceptual and contradictory union; and ‘OutPut’, by the italians Marotta & Russo, which uses the original cliparts of hypercard to self-referentially describe the historical period of information technology around the Nineties. It succeeds in brilliantly crystallize two phenomena: the availability and the parallel demand of hardware to create and show artworks and, thanks to the characteristics of the Apple Classic, the union of hardware and software in a unique objet d’art, which is just starting to become affordable and which, according to the organizers, challenges the impossibility to sell digital art.
