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.
The urban area of Innsbruck hides two small wireless server that the windows of the Head of the store Wholly Cow Cafe and send, or rather trying to send pictures to other devices on the go. The vendors are nothing if not phones, notebooks, laptops, PDAs, guests in the pockets of passers-by their owners. In addition to the server a message that invites recipients to bring the images to 'kunstpavillion', where they will be decoded in alphabetic texts visible on the screen of the receiver. This is Decoy01 by Rainer Mandl, a project based on bluetooth technology that invests urban space transforming individuals on-carrier. Decoy is a lure that draws attention to the size herziana of the subjects in which they are immersed, but which do not seem to realize. In fact, if the data is accessible almost anywhere via the Internet, the interaction with the network is geographically located and bound to the nodes and wired connections. In the space wireless bluetooth connector instead is the individual himself, active synapses that physically moves through the city carrying information. Then the urban space becomes network and virtual community materializes in the art gallery. The content of the message does not matter. The network-enabled performance is entirely self-referential. There are numerous examples of art from wireless to be able to quote comparison, the Active Posters of HP Labs in Bristol, the Pervasive Connections in London, from mobile music of Location 33 in Culver City (California) to Taxi Madrid by Anne Lorenz & Rebekka Reich. As different as they are all united by the need to anchor the intangible dimension of radio frequencies and infrared, which triggers the transmission of signals, visible and tactile space of the city, forcing the individual to the movement, to a net surfing and not more virtual static, but dynamic and physical. In a sense the military decoy is a decoy which scavenge the enemy. In this case, the opposition becomes a man-machine collaboration in solidarity, in contrast to the classical model of Shannon and Weaver information: man is neither source nor receiver of information, but medium.
