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.
How does generative art relate to semiotic? Does the randomic association between the signifier and the signified blur the process of meaning construction? If you adehere to the interpretative perspective, that includes the context as well as the interpreteur as parts of the communication process, it doesn’t. Thus the randomic association between images and words generated by a machine does make sense. This is the concept that hides behind the Ad Generator, a generative artwork that explores how advertising uses and manipulates language, created by Alexis Lloyd as part of her thesis project at Parsons The New School for Design. Alexis Loyd is an interactive designer, information architect, and new media artist whose work includes interaction design, social networking software, and data-driven multimedia art. The Ad Generator shows her interest in the ways in which collections and databases can reveal patterns of meaning, and in creating tools that allow people to interact with information and each other in innovative ways. In this artwork, in fact, words and semantic structures from real corporate slogans are remixed and randomized to generate invented slogans. These slogans are then paired with related images from Flickr, according to their tags, thereby generating fake advertisements on the fly. The aim of the project is to show how the language of advertising is both deeply meaningful and meningless: on the one hand, in fact, it represents real cultural values and desires, while on the other these ideas have no relationship to the products being sold. Unlike some generators, this one requires no inputs from the user, although if you’d like to capture the images, you have to be somewhat quick: there’s no way to “stop” the ads from being generated every 3 seconds or so, a feature that is just as well annoying as the landscape of advertising itself. Watching this nevereneding sequence of ads it’s natural asking how long it will take before real advertising creative is done by algorithm? Based on the quality of some of the results, this practise could be in act right now.
Valentina Culatti
