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.
MIT Press, ISBN 0262232340 The feeling that something is 'alive' is closely linked to the autonomy of expression of the object in question. The simulations of 'life', that is the area of 'artificial life', has attracted since the early nineties many artists ready to take advantage of the generative mechanisms of the basis for developing new concepts and parameters. The 'metacreazione' referred to by the title, therefore, is to create a work not stable and defined, but a system of rules and basic infrastructure that evolves independently, and that is intermediate (meta) between its creation and ultimate results. Although the sacred fire that led artistic research at the highest emotional impact (robotics, form generation) seems to have slowed down in the new millennium, as demonstrated by the examples in this text, it remains an irresistible charm of involvement within artificial systems, and the associated unpredictability of the interaction, typically linked to the human race. In this sense the naturalness of 'generativity' of the algorithms used becomes the figure by which to judge them, and their application in time costuisce a useful historical memory of these practices. The book tries to assemble a compendium of useful and exhaustive, only partially successful for the latter aspect that perhaps he should also include the latest biotech experiments, strongly critical of the celebration of the creation of life in itself. In this sense, are rare in this fantastic irony of organic forms of William Lathan as well as the paradox of the cloning of Natalie Jeremijenko, who instead are an important (though not exclusive) approach to strategic issues, out of self-congratulation that aesthetic featured a number of artists of the scope.
