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.
Scheidegger & Spiess, ISBN 9783858812100, Germany, 2008, English / German
A yearbook published by the Department of Art & Media at the Zurich University of the Arts details the support given to the young generation of media artists trained at the institution. This is a lavish product, designed to help promote talented work (and also, therefore, the school) through a combination of short descriptive texts, lots of pictures and a DVD. We are presented with work from 13 artists in total (Valentina Vuksic, André Gwerder, Marc Lee, Lea Filodoro, Andalus, Markus von Glasenapp, Sven König, Annina Rüst, Meriem Bouhara, iMediengruppe Bitnik, Mario Purkathofer, Fabian Voegeli, Roland Roos), some of whom have already been able to establish their name internationally. This yearbook provides an opportunity to survey new media from a generational standpoint, and raises questions about whether there are any commonalities among this young Swiss group. One immediate answer to this focuses on the idea of the choices of specific medias. Moreover, we are presented with works that look at the technical limits and possibilities of various media, and which explore their relationship with social environments and rules. Inke Arns (a member of the teaching staff) frames the current artistic development in terms of being post-medium (which will hopefully help promote the notion of the redundancy of the term ‘new’ in ‘new media’) and stresses the importance of a critical and tactical evaluation of tools used. Andreas Broeckmann, in one of his “Seven short essays on art and media”, reinforces this position affirming that “Even though this art uses digital technological means, it is a mode of experience that takes us to the limits of perception, sensitivity and thought”. And both are simply on the right track.
