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 potentially infinite work Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf by Przemek Zajfert & Burkhard Walther is based on the sharing of a Pinhole Camera, equipped with a double stenopeic hole, and able to get on a black and white negative two parallel exposures,slightly juxtaposed. The camera, built with cardboard and aluminum, is on sale on Ebay every week. The first buyer commits himself to send the camera to the second buyer of the same Pinhole Camera, after having made the first exposure. Then the second buyer makes the second exposure, sending in the end the camera back to the Merid gallery in Stuttgart. The gallery periodically exhibits this double-photographs series, and the printing of the first pictures catalogue has been scheduled for spring 2006. The project is dedicated to the sole and unfinished work ‘Opalka 1965/1-∞’ by the polish artist Roman Opalka. It was made up of single paintings of the same size, named ‘Details’, spread all over the world. They made up the concrete part of the abstract concept behind its work: a pictorial translation of the ascending order from 1 to infinite, that ends with the artist’s death. In Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf we can see a photographic mosaic taking shape during time, based on parallel exposures. Their authors, scattered all over the world, get in touch through the generated pictures, that are replicated and diffused as memes, micro-unities of intellectual/visual evolution. They can be seen as a active part of an infectious photographic language, a cultural virus that according to the theories of Francesca Woodman proves that “the theory behind the work is important, but it’s always secondary to the eye’s satisfaction.”
Eleonora Calvelli
