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.
The collage as an art form reminds of the way our vision works- the nanosecond twitches of focus that render our immediate visual environment. Japanese media duo exonemo have been working with this sentiment along with some inspiration from David Hockney’s ‘The Joiners’ series, to develop an iPhone application whereby photos are instantly collaged and made manipulable. Bearing the same title, a functional homage to Hockney’s collage works, exonemo played with the idea of having an image instantly collage, in particular they were interested in people’s faces- what they considered essential to remembering a person. Focusing on the possibilities of the touch screen led exonemo to work towards enhancing their overall photo taking experience. In Japan, where a considerable mobile picture culture exists, simply referred to as, ‘shameru,’ or directly translated as ‘picture mail,’ has users taking mobile camera photos of any visual spectacle encountered and transmitting a visual souvenir or greeting to their desired recipient. Indeed, a number of simple, in-phone, post-production functions exist though they haven’t really been seen in Japan. Upon taking a photo, ‘Joiner’ enables a visual remix live and on the spot with the displayed image automatically collaged and each individual fragment, or cell, is available for further parsing, spreading or overlapping and reintegrating via the touch screen. Pinching the screen can cut down the respective range of individual cells in the formed grid to create a depth effect in the morphous photomontage. exonemo have opened up a whole new world for users to experiment and edit with the photos they have taken, offering new a sensory and tactile platform for interacting and sharing our visual environment. Joiner was presented at Interferenze Seeds Tokyo 2010. Check the Interferenze Seeds Tokyo 2010 photo set here.
Vicente Gutierrez
