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.
Eduardo Kac, already a pioneer in the 90s of Biotelematics and Transgenic Art, continues its line of research in the phenomena of communication between different species (men, machines, plants, animals, …) with the new installation: ' Move 36 '. The title is inspired by the famous move (36 in fact) that allowed in 1997 to 'Deep Blue' to defeat the greatest chess player Gary Kasparov. The installation is composed by a large checkerboard made with earth (square blacks) and sand (white square) placed at the center of a room. In the square where he was made the famous "move 36" is placed a plant (tomato) that incorporates a gene designed by Kac specifically for this job. The gene uses ASCII code to represent in binary the famous judgment of Descartes 'Cogito ergo sum'. This has been made possible thanks to a double complex operation. At first Kac translated text in a series of 0 and 1; subsequently has established a standard procedural that would allow to translate the 0 and 1 in a sequence of the four structural elements of the DNA according to the following formula: A = 00, C = 01, G = 10 and T = 11. The gene 'Cartesian' thus produced is capable of producing mutations in the plant into which has been inserted and such mutations, according to the author's intentions, should be such that they can be easily perceived by the human eye. The installation is then completed by two screens placed on opposite sides of the room, depicting the two boards in which each square is made up of different video loops that alternate at irregular intervals, like a vast game of chess between ghosts. Leaving aside any consideration (and worry) about the disconcerting ease with which it is possible to isolate, synthesize and play the DNA, it should be sottolineatao what appears to be the truly distinctive aspect of the installation, ie the search for the border area between the human and the non-human, the living and the nonliving. The subjectivity of inanimate beings, in whose "actions" is often identified a force comparable to that produced by the characteristic of the human subjectivity ('Deep Blue' that beat Kasparov), is emphasized in the work of Kac in order to suggest a way Alternatively to the understanding of the phenomena of communication between species, in the direction of a dialogical communication that can free by the mortgage anthropocentric. If art is a fundamental gesture cognitive intervention to a symbolic level, not practical, it is right, therefore, abandon any ethical concern and accept the works of Kac (either fluorescent or rabbits cogitanti plants) as an invitation to move "our attention on what remains firmly hidden from view but which nevertheless affect us directly. "
