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.
“I went back home, but I couldn’t keep calm. I went down the street and started running, fast, faster and faster [ … ] I felt as if I took all the blood I saw on the ground back, lost as from a tap open to break the knob, I felt it in my body” (Roberto Saviano, Gomorra, 2006). Could we consider Roberto Saviano, the Italian writer who grew up near Naples and started writing about the Camorra because of his anger, revealing disturbing secrets about it and now living under escort, a victim? While the average reader, safely far from the author’s world, can’t help feeling like a “war tourist”, Saviano could easily be either a case study or one of the theorists participating to Victims’ Symptom (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Culture). This project, commissioned as a special initiative to mark LabforCulture one-year anniversary, analyses the meaning of a victim who has survived a traumatic event, becoming both a witness and a suffering subject. The aim is to move forward the notion of PTSD from psycho-traumatic diagnosis to a symptomatic term in media studies. The Victims’ Symptom project is based on Ana Peraica’s text “War profiteers in art”, a critique of the biennialisation and commodification of images of victims in response to Robert Storr’s exhibition at the Venice Biennale this year. The full project, accompanied by critical texts, documentation, commissioned artworks and reflections by the curator will be online in April 2008. The commissioned artworks approach the topic in specific ways. Indeed, there are key thought provoking questions artists and theorists involved are asked to answer and commissioned artworks will serve as triggers. The meta-archive “Landscape 1995” by Marko Peljhan, for example, investigates the strategic and tactical battleground on the Bosnia and Herzegovina fronts from 1992 onward, with a special focus on one of the largest European massacre after World War II – Srebrenica – where victims were used, though not supported by the media, and which was even denied by some theorists. Colombian artist Mauricio Arango presents “Day After Day”, a cartography of victims as reported by several international online news media outlets. It consists of a world map showing the usage of the word “victim” in news from around the globe. Andreja Kulunčić’s project – “Bad News” – is focused on our relationship with bad news as the media broadcast it daily. Olia LIalina’s net.art classic “My Boyfriend came back from the war” is revisited in a web 2.0 version by Alejandro Duque building a specific and individual storyboard of collateral victims, with the help of a psychotherapist, prove that victims are not just numbers, but individual stories. Moreover Martha Rosler’s “Dust of the Office” is a collection of HTML documents and
supporting media focusing on the global biopolitics of control. Among the theorists, Stevan Vuković writes about reliable witnesses (PTSD and victim), confronting us again with the Srebrenica massacre. Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, reflects upon how to reconstruct a victim individual story, starting from its base number status in the media. An article by Sezgin Boynik researches how activist e-mailing networks influenced the production of the Kosovo art scene in the late nineties, while Geert Lovink addresses the issue of blogging as therapy. There will be the opportunity to comment on and discuss these texts in a live debate with their authors in spring 2008.
Valentina Culatti
