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.
Daniel Shiffman, a degree in mathematics and philosophy at Yale University and a position as researcher at the University of New York, soon began to experiment with the interactive potential of new media when, as often happens, the art establishment has noticed him and made it one of the most pampered young American artists in the media. The mathematical approach is evident in all the works of Shiffman, so that it is not always easy to identify where runs the line that separates the technical testing of the aesthetic. No exception to this rule the project Swarm in 2002. It is an interactive installation that "paints" on a screen the images captured by a camera with a "technique" that closely resembles the dripping. In fact, the impression that one has before installing Shiffman is that of a typical dense network of stains and doodles of the works of Pollock. To achieve Swarm, Shiffman has adapted the program Boids (originally created by Craig Reynolds for special effects and widely used in Hollywood) so as to make it produce long streaks of color and synchronized with a camera that records the movements of the user. The painting therefore is made in real time and the user can look at himself in it. The most interesting aspect of Swarm is just that, the work exists only when someone stands in front of the camera, and disappears as soon as they are farther away. On one hand, abstract expressionism to Pollock, on the other recur here is one of the typical themes of art on the net, that the work that is carried out is completed only with the intervention of the user who is thus freed to a few seconds, the liability to which it is forced by the traditional system of enjoyment of art. Also interesting is the next project Yellow (2003), in which 'Swarm' is adapted to capture the motion of a single color, the yellow note. The installation, created in Manhattan, captures the movement of the typical New York Yellow Cabs and imprints on the screen of bright yellow strips in response to changes that taxis perform in city traffic.
