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.
There’s always been a tight relationship between art and advertising. In the past as well as in present times artists worked for advertising and/or with ads in their artworks. Some famous ads are part of art collections. And even if finding a direct derivation from art would be excessive, most of art directors from the past were famous artists, and advertising in its first expressions used visual art aesthetics. The connection is even more ambiguous on the web because online artists usually have web developers profiles. The ambiguity is probably related to the web double nature: is it a transaction platform or a spontaneous network? Those into social networks hate ads on the web, as it is proved by the most popular and downloaded ever Firefox extensions: ‘addblockers’. These extensions work by preventing advertising images downloads, replacing them with blank space. Steve Lambert and Evan Harper at Eyebeam OpenLab have gone a step further with their AddArt project, a browser extension which replaces advertising images on web pages with art images from a curated database. They stated on the website: “For many, replacing ads with blank space would be enough. AddArt attempts to do something more interesting than just blocking ads – it turns your browser into an art gallery”. The work is still in prototype mode, but looks promising. It will be supported by a small website providing information on the current artists and curator, along with a schedule of past and upcoming AddArt shows. Each two weeks will include from five to eight artists selected by emerging and established curators. Artists can target sites and/or default to any page on the internet with ads. Even if only a small percentage of Addblockers users downloaded AddArt extension, the number would be impressive with the result of bringing contemporary art to different types of people desktops.
Valentina Culatti
