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.
Middle-nineties were undoubtedly a seminal period for the media arts with flourishing new international initiatives that boosted by the global telematic networks advent, connecting media history with the future of media. The Tokyo’s InterCommunication Center (ICC) was initiated by NTT the major Japanese telecommunication company in 1997 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of telephone service in Japan, and from then on it played an essential role in Asia media art scene. They’re celebrating their first decade through a series of symposia (moderated by Minoru Hatanaka and Yukiko Shikata) and an exhibition that tries to both going over the recent past and make an analysis of the present. The ICC formula (“encouraging dialogue between technology and the arts”) is invisibly embedded in the exhibition enlightening the public on how machine, data and their relationships with our evoluted brains have changed during the years. The exhibition is divided into five different zone. The ‘art and technology’ seemed to give the most comprehensive vision. In the selected works is finally clear how the abstract visualization of data is very often coupled with simulation of ‘natural systems’, or how ‘reality’ has been tentatively implemented in digital artworks. This part includes seminal and heterogeneous artworks (like ‘PLX’ by Ryota Kuwakubo or “The Secret Lives of Numbers” by Golan Levin), an ’emergencies’ part hosting emerging and prospective artists, an educational chronology and an entire anechoic room. In the ‘research and development’ zone a few projects show the visions of research groups, like ‘Gainer Kaidan’, based on IAMAS PDP (Programmable Device Project), that interactively and creatively sonifys the main ICC stairs establishing an instinctive relationship with the walking visitor. In the ‘network’ zone the interface to telematic networks use is questioned reacting with ‘live’ forces as well as pure poetry to routine behaviors that risk to freeze the still high potential of radically changing the rules in human communication. Finally, the ‘archive’ zone is meant to preserve the history of the ICC restless activity, through a library and the HIVE image recording archive, testifying how we not only need emotions, paradoxes and stimuli, but also memory to continue to use technology to evolve.
