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.
VAVAsoft is an unusual software house: its two applications seem to be the outcome of creator’s real needs more than the outcome of some market-driven strategies. Tinnitus Tamer is a tone generator replicating in a very flexible and precise way the tinnitus phenomenon produced by our neuronal ear system. The concept behind the software is: the shift between silence and tinnitus-like sounds would train our brain to adapt and assimiliate the sound, somehow “eliminating” the problem. The principle which here artificially produces the tinnitus is believed to be very similar to the organic one. The sound is generated by positive feedback between inappropriate axon connections. The same way positive feedback in electric circuits produce similar sounds. The software is pretty simple but at the same time versatile. It blends in the three different frequency ranges (low, middle, high) whose volume and frequencies can be individually adjusted. There are also nine available slots to record different configurations and 3 different emission methods (pure, sweep, noise). The software homeopathyc approach is engaging, trying to lower the tinnitus influence on our attention. It let us become more familiar with it, slowly slipping in the background, till it almost fades away. Nevertheless the intentions seem to be focused in exploiting human being ability to survive and adapt to extreme and very different conditions. Actually this approach lies in the western medicine patterns which usually cure the symptoms more then the causes. The symptom removal, in this case its masking and disguise, does not really affect its source, but it might induce a mutation to let it function in different ways.
Tony Canonico
