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 outsourcing project, presented by the software artist Leonardo Solaas during the latest ‘ReadMe 100, Temporary Art Factory‘, has its founding principle in a specific socio-economical consideration: there’s a substantial gapbetween the most developed country’s stipends and the emergent countries’ ones. This gap makes the outsourcing process (or the services’ commission to external businesses) attractive for both the involved subjects. On one side the employer (belonging to the rich minority) can save on production costs, on the other side the employed (a talented person from a third world country) earns more money. But this apparent fair trade is clearly an exploit, where the employer is avidly cashing a high percentage of revenues, and the employed have to face competition and so he’s forced to lower prices in order to get work commissions and use his know how for others. The Argentine’s Solaas idea wants to subvert this unfair exchange through the stipulation of a special contract where the artist (the ‘Contractor’) place his knowledge at the employer’s disposal to develop the project of one of the employers’ ideas. This idea is picked up by the artist, but the employer is the copyright owner as he did it himself. In this case, there was also a meta-employer, the Readme 100 Temporary Software Art Factory, in charge of the payment. The employer has considered the artist’s background, competence and interests. The artist, on the other hand, has picked up the most stimulating and feasible idea. So ‘Go-Logo’ by Eric Londaits has been picked up. The author thinks that the only possibility to be heard in the future will be to have ‘a flashy logo and a catchy tune’. So Go-Logo’ is a survival kit, able to realize a unique and attractive logo in real time. Solaas has developed a flash application that randomly generates logos consequently to what the user type in the text field. But if the concept of ‘software art’ is a work in progress, then we can embody the Florian Cramer’s definition (“it’s a form of art whose topic is the algorithm and the end goal is the creative concept for an application”) and so state that the Solaas’ work is a good example of artistic code.
Valentina Culatti
