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-R.A.S.C. is a device that protects against infrared surveillance cameras. It is in fact composed of an elastic wearable band equipped with special LEDs that emit infrared rays that are invisible to the naked eye because their frequency is between 780 and 1 mm. But the reception of the image on the surveillance cameras is amended and a ball of light replaces the face of the person framed. The device developed by the group U.R.A. / FILOART reacts to the spread of visual surveillance in all public and private spaces as the last bulwark against every potential crime. But there are other works that have used a similar approach: in a more ironic way, for example, the special umbrella “Umbrella CCD-Me-Not” part of the Sentient City Survival Kit by Mark Shepard has been designed with a similar mode of operating: the infrared LEDs in the canopy are visible in the form of whitish spot only to CCD surveillance cameras, masking the person under the umbrella with their signal. Although its symbolic value (an umbrella always protects from something unpleasant or harmful to the person) this object is not always a practical accessory. With an intent stated by the artists themselves, the I-R.A.S.C. was born to be actually used and it is easy to build even without specific technical skills. The technologies to be used against surveillance cameras are so different now, which brings into question their function as a “panacea” against lawlessness. And it is fascinating (but disturbing) thinking that devices based on even more transparent and “embedded” digital technologies move this exhausting struggle between security and privacy into the invisible world of the infrared.
Chiara Ciociola
