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.
The concept that has been characteristic of the studies of sound spatialization assumes that the listener is in a situation of passivity. But for the mobility and fluidity of contemporary society would be more useful a sound technology that can "follow" the movements of the listeners. This technology, which is controlled through the use of computer tools, allows you to create complex sound environments and perform precise sound mapping of an area. The project speakerphone , these days on display at the "MediaLounge" the Media Lab at Huddersfield (UK), was born at the Media Lab Europe, and is a modular audio system with multiple applications. The researchers Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Stefan Agamanolis have created this platform for sound spatialization consists of twenty-four boxes connected to each other in a distributed manner, which reproduces the structure of the Internet. Based on the concept of the Protocol "traceroute", able to trace the path of the TCP / IP packets along the network connections, speakerphone allows you to be able to "move" the sound from a single speaker to the other along pathways redefined from time to time through a 'control interface. In fact, a computer manages the flow of sound through a multiplexer and switches that are connected in a distributed manner and independent of the various speakers. Through the platform can be "direct", as you can do with a ray of light, any kind of sound. The distributed structure of the system, which presents itself as a 'ceiling' apply to you if the need arises, provides a high possibility of interaction. The audience becomes "active" as in a position to control the flow of information audible: through the specially designed interfaces, and the upcoming implementation of the system should include its remote control, extending the value for situations requiring real distribution network Sound addressable ad personam.
