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.
What sound do we hear when the machines “talk” to each other? We are partly excluded from this conversation because the human body is not designed to “hear” machine language. Through the work “Speak / Fala” Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo Crescenti attempted to make machines talk our language in order for them to communicate among themselves and with us. The installation “Speak / Fala” consists of a small crowd of mobile phones placed on microphones stands. Triggered by the sound of a human voice that pronounces something, the phones start to engage in a game of Chinese Whispers, taking it in turns to pass on the message. But in what sense do they “talk”? They emit words in twenty different languages (the number of languages understood by the devices chosen). When someone speaks a word into the microphone, the first device repeats using the language on which it is set, choosing the most similar word to the one heard from the internal vocabulary of about 3000 entries. This similarity can be at the semantic level, if the device is able to interpret a connection. The connection can also be phonetic, according to the sound similarities between different languages. Of course, the last word in the chain will not necessarily be the one started with. In the words of the artists, most of these conversations turn out as “waterfalls of words” joined together by a kind of poetic link switching between sound and meaning. Through a harmonic sound stream that could be the signifier or the meaning, the work seems to remember the unique matrix of our languages. This harmony is actually created by the algorithmic and voiceless machine language, which silently remains the only universal language currently possible.
Chiara Ciociola
Speak / Fala
SPEAK from cantoni-crescenti on Vimeo.
