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.
Despite the popular feelings, life in itself is a non-linear path. We are used to think about life as a permanent sequence of hours, days and years following each other. While, if we look closer to the infinite subjectivities, there is only a remote chance to get the cause and effect linear process within the whole random stream of consciousness. “LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible …“, a non-linear installation by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Shiro Takatani, at NTT InterCommunication Center [ICC] in Tokyo till 4 November, reproduces this matter of fact. It consists of a grid of 3 x 3 acrylic square aquariums, 1.2 meters wide, that hung in a darkened room. Each has a thin film of water inside, and speakers at both ends. Ultrasonic waves create an artificial fog, filtering fluid patterns. Takatani’s imagery is projected through the tanks, including footage of Nazi prison camps, racial strifes in the American South and first-hand accounts of hardships, with a disturbingly dreamlike quality as the footage appears to float in the air. Music and sounds sampled from LIFE, the original opera composed by Sakamoto in 1999, are coming out from the speakers fixed to each aquarium, adding their own eerie part to the overall effect. Being run by a random control software, audio and visual files are aimlessly uploaded from the database, creating a constantly changing installation. Any actual meaning is eclipsed through the non-sequential and unique sequence of pictures and sounds that goes on endlessly. As if the artists wanted to pay a tribute to the randomness of life, just because life, in the end, is meaningless.
Valentina Culatti
