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.
In an almost amused the London-based group, made up of artists and designers trained at the Royal College of Arts, invents objects 'intelligent'. One of these 'devices' is the TV Predator , a seemingly innocuous picture, actually a saboteur television. 'Jealous', in fact, the attention that the TV receives, disrupting its broadcasts, preventing it from working properly, changing channels, changing the sound volume, changing the color, turning it on or turning it off in the middle of the night suddenly. That artificial intelligence is an open question that, in addition to having influenced the imagination of authors like Dick or Kubrick and be the foundation of the cyberpunk of Gibson and Sterling, is the field of debate among scientists and philosophers. The fundamental question is one: "computers can think? '. Hobbesian The current functionalist believes that a properly programmed computer is equipped with a pure intelligence, not distinguishable from that of humans.'s So-called weak AI argues, however, that a machine can only simulate some cognitive processes. More on that this long-standing dispute, however, the TV Predator pushes us to reflect on the relationship that is established between objects and human beings. Consider, for example in toys such as Tamagochi, soft toys cybernetic, the 'pets' such as the Sony Aibo, the new robotic dolls (My Real Baby) or any electronic items. According to the previously mentioned these are Sterling Gizmos, ie gadgets meant for the users, which, however, acquire meaning and function only in relation to their end-users. But these same objects, today, are revealing a dark side, unexpected: Electromagnetic radiation that release into the environment. Immersed in this space has a physical substance and three-dimensional, defined Herziano by Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby in their Design Noir: The Dark Side of Electronic Objects, the user becomes an anti-hero, forced to counteract the negative effects of radiation. If the computer god-awful story of Brown's response is nothing more than science fiction, think back to the direction where tends technological innovation with respect to the relationship between man and machine is a real need and the Troika of devices (TV Predator, Electrophobe, Guerrilla Project) go in this direction.
