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.
Undoubtedly, the work Quadratime of seite4, fractal abstract art software, part of the exhibition Algorithmische Revolution at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, and inspired by the painting Black Square (1915) by Kazimir Malevich, is one of the most natural derivations of abstract painting in the context of digital art. In the treatise 'The world is not objective', claiming the 'supremacy of pure feeling in art', Malevich, as the founder of Russian avant-garde group Supremus, wrote: "Suprematism is the rediscovery of pure art that over time , has been obscured by the accumulation of 'things' … The black square on a white background was the first form of feeling 'non-objective' was to be expressed. The square symbolizes the feelings, the white background, the emptiness beyond of them. " The disruption of the schemes started by the artistic avant-garde classics and completed by conceptual art of the sixties and seventies of last century, it receives a new impulse to this the seemingly quiet revolution algorithm that is the basis of interactive art. The Black Square by Malevich, the white canvas of Rauschenberg's composition 4'33 "by John Cage, or conceptual work 'An Empty Website' (1998) of Fred M. Katz. Logic & Light – represented by a web page white, indexed by the keywords "empty, blank, vacant, vacuum, vacuity, vacancy, void, zilch, nada, empty website, empty web-site, wasteland, nothing, null, nil, zero, emptiness, whitespace, nullibiety" , and a time to point out, in the debate on the use of HTML in communication, redundancy, and sometimes the futility of graphic signs and media – are certainly comparable to the work Quadratime, transformation of abstract art painting in a digital algorithm can be structured independently and generate their own movement without specific interventions, a work which can also be interpreted as an invitation to reflect on the nature of art itself, because, as Malevich wrote in 1915: "The Art .. . no longer wants the object as such and believed to be able to say without the thing … in and of itself. "
