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.
book – Hatje Cantz – ISBN 3775716599
The hybrid as symbol of evolutionary change was used as the main theme of Ars Electronica 2005, subdivided into the ‘cultures’, ‘politics’, ‘ecologies’ and ‘creatures’ sections. Hybridization is a recurring theme these days, but, once it’s abstracted, as was here, merely corresponds to a contamination of languages, something that has already happened for a long time in any cultural milieu, and that often ends in the cyborg loop without being able to produce a new and freeing vision that gives birth to new processes. This abstraction, in times of transition like ours, can therefore be filled with the most varied contents (from De Kerkhove’s theoretical convolutions to the pictures of adolescents toting weapons from the videogame Half Life made by AES+F Group), all legitimately taking their inspiration from an idea of transformation which is undoubtely in progress, but would deserve better analytical and synthetical tools. On the other hand, this way, the generalistic identity of a huge festival like this is kept coherent by inglobating every possibility in an all-embracing frame, following a not very positive tradition which began as far back as five years ago. Is this the fate of big festivals, embracing extra-wide themes to survive? If this is the case, with all the forecasted developments made possible by a pharaonic fund (a new Ars Electronica Center worth 25 million euros and the designation of Linz as European Culture Capital for 2009), the future doesn’t look so interesting.
