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 ‘crowdsourcing’ is the controversial practice on which many services of the so-called web 2.0 are based. Crowdsourcing derives from ‘outsourcing’ (dislocating manufacturing activities where labour cost is cheaper), that basically consists of capitalizing on the net users’ intellectual labour, paying them cents or even nothing. At the front of this rising business there’s Amazon with its Mechanical Turk platform. This service offers to any business would ask for, a big amount of unskilled teleworkers, willing to do little works in their spare time. Mechanical Turk has been devised for a range of tasks, the more banal for a human being the more complicated for a computer. Examples of successful projects are the cataloguing with tags of pictures or the transcription of podcast transmissions. Although it has been recently opened, some anomalous uses of this platform has started to emerge. Why Are You Here, Right Now? is a Swedish editorial project that has gathered textual input by ‘turkers’ from all over the world. One thousands workers have replied to the above question for a penny. The resulting content has been edited and organized in fifty days and the book is on sale on a print-on-demand portal. The result is at the same time an investigation on a bored generation, desperately seeking stimuli and the celebration of a multitude attitude, anonymous nad fragmented. The Sheep Market is instead a work that uses the Mechanical Turk in a perfectly ironic manner. Aaron Koblin, a media designer has limited himself to ask to teleworkers to draw with an online tool a “sheep with the muzzle facing left” for two cents. Turkers has massively answered the call, filling in forty days a database with ten thousands sheep variations. When the project has been closed, Koblin has defiantly put the draws for sale at twenty dollars each, causing havoc among the communities of teleworkers. But the operation turned out to be perfectly legal: turkers has signed an agreement where they dropped any right on the pictures they created. The official website hosts a recording of the drawing session of each sheep and the overall statistics give some measure of the exploiting potential of such a mechanism. An inspiring parable for the future worker flocks.
Paolo Pedercini
