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.
Is baring a hard disk by making its content public still considered an act of provocation? In 2000, starting with the sarcastic idea that “privacy is stupid”, the 0100101110101101.ORG group launched the project “Life Sharing”, a real-time file sharing system in which the group transmitted online all their daily computer activities. In 2011, almost a decade later, artist Nick Briz has made all the content of his hard disk available to the public in the work “Copy this Drive”. The installation consists of a transparent monitor, supported by a (transparent) column that contains the artist’s hard drive. Anyone is welcome to connect via a USB cable and copy any relevant file or make a clone of the whole drive. Compared to 0100101110101101.ORG’s work, Briz’s installation is more agile, because of the simplicity of the gesture needed to access the data and the blatant aesthetic of transparency. Due to this transparency the physical presence of the hard disk as an object in itself becomes more preeminent: this presence underlines the fact that although small, it contains a large amount of precious data. Such aesthetic choices are not new, however. For example in 2004, the net artist Brian Mackern, auctioned his computer containing the source code of all his works and everything he had collected over several years, leaving all the content inaccessible until its eventual sale. In 2011, the artist Manuel Palou exposed a hard drive in a more traditional way, enclosed in a glass case, to ironically emphasize its value: the artist in fact said that it contained proprietary software illegally downloaded of an alleged value of $5,000,000 (but without providing any proof of this). In the case of “Copy this Drive” the intent to share is more clear and immediate: we are not faced with a stream of remotely-accessed data, nor with an object with an unverifiable economic value. Following the explicit invitation of the work’s title we can really look around, peek and click the contents of the hard drive that we want to copy and take home. Copy this Drive stands thus in stark contrast with the historical function of the artist as a privileged reader of a hidden reality that he chooses to reveal in a more or less accessible way. In this case the value is in the extreme accessibility of the data: the artist is totally undressed in front of his audience. He makes the public an active participant in all the resources that are available (including the personal ones) as a starting point (and not an end) for all the countless developments that may arise from those files.
Chiara Ciociola
