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.
Since 2006, the RYBN collective has been using the tools of data mining (automated extraction of knowledge from large amounts of data) to subvert its own goals, building unusual representations and analyses of financial and social mechanisms. The project Antidatamining includes works such as “Flashcrash sonification”, a graphic and sound representation of the 20-minute stock market crash (and the 1,000,000,000,000 USD lost) that occurred on May 6, 2010. Another piece, “ADM / MLP”, is automation prototype for forecasting market trends, designed with the ultimate goal of suppressing human involvement in financial decisions, a factor that is still the major cause of errors and approximations. The latest software programmed by the collective is an amateur trading bot (named BOT) that has been used to invest in the financial markets. The goal of the software is not gain, but rather bankruptcy. With an initial capital of about ten thousand euros, the BOT takes improper decisions on purpose, according to the recommendations of internal algorithms, which can also be influenced by arbitrary external parameters in order to identify and anticipate future markets. The BOT’s decisions can be assessed daily on a dedicated online page that contains all the relevant financial data updated in real time, including a countdown timer set to the precise moment when final failure is expected. As with previous RYBN collective works, BOT surprises us with its weird (and extreme) but perfect use of an apparently neutral resource like data mining. But what makes this piece direct such a biting irony at the mechanisms of the financial world is that organizing intellectual energies for the purposes of extreme speculation and gain can have the same destructive results as a grotesque suicide-bomber software, scientifically programmed for self-destruction.
Chiara Ciociola
