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.
Jan Robert Leegte’s new works re-examine the hypermateriality of the digital domain. Educated as a sculptor and architect this Dutch artist has a unique approach to art in the context of the internet. His recent online work‚ Random Selection in Random Image pushes the boundaries of both the notion of creativity and of individual perception. Leegte has created a smart commentary on thenew prerequisites for the reception and production of art in a technology infested environment. By highlighting random areas within random images from Flickr he both undermines and reinstates Ronald Barthes’ idea of the punctum in photography. “The notion of the manifested or materialized cognitive process of selecting intrigues me,“ says Leegte about this work. Also the punctum is no longer a purely immaterial, social or psychological phenomenon, but it merges fluidly with an encoded and embedded media-material reality. Images and particularly photographs have lost a great deal of their magic and appeal since they started flooding the net. By taking them as raw matter for the new camera (computer software) and the new eye (the network) images are reinvigorated. In Random Selection Leegte brings back the element of surprise to each photograph by robbing us of our alleged privilege of being at the basis of our own point of view, our own gaze, literally. In an interview with V2, Canadian theorist Brian Massumi describes this kind of manipulation as elementary to art: “Every art object works by tapping into a certain aspect of “natural” perception in order to re-abstract it, so that some actual potentials that were there are suspended while others that tended not to appear before, or even had never appeared before, are brought out.“ In this work the uncertainty brought on by the use of software agents and bots is used to our advantage. It is used to reinstate the poetry and the magic of the image.
