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.
Karsten Schmidt, aka toxi, author of the experiments' Macronaut 'and' The Well ', continues to divide between the commercial collaborations and projects published (complete with source code attached) on its website. The last in order of time is called ' Base 26 'and it is amazing. This is an attempt to give a new view to all 4-letter words in the English language (or at least of 1650 contained in the Oxford Dictionary). The project is based on two main assumptions: each letter of each word is considered to be a unique number and this principle is expressed by a mathematical formula to which the letter A is given by 0 * 26n, while Z is equal to 25 * 26n. In the formula adopted 'n' represents the position of the letter in the word, then we have n = 3 for the first letter, and so with a descending progression, up to n = 0 to the last letter. The second assumption is based on the use of number that identifies the letter as a coordinate of a 4D representation in which the fourth dimension is represented by time. So, taking the example of the word 'base', we have that b = time, a = X, s = Z, and Y = Through this mathematical algorithm on the basis of 26 (the number of letters of the alphabet), Karsten manages to give life to an astonishing four-dimensional visualization of words. In the graph (which uses inter alia a table of colors to highlight the recurrence of adverbs, pronouns, verbs, etc..) Can also determine the frequency of a word based on the width of the radius around the node that is in a language filtered by Boolean operators and represented through Cartesian axes. This may seem like just normal, in fact we are accustomed to seeing manipulate programming languages, the novelty in this case is that we are faced with a language, the English precisely, which makes the experiment Karsten Schmidt merits, therefore, the 'semeiologists well as the attention of web designers. For anyone wishing to engage – and well worth the money – you can download the source code is distributed under the 'creative commons license'.
