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.
On 16 January 2013 a parcel was shipped from the borough of Hackney to the Ecuadorian Embassy, final recipient: Julian Assange. The package contained a phone which, through a hole in the box, photographed the surrounding environment every ten seconds, documenting the whole delivery route. Each photo was uploaded in real-time to a Twitter account on the website of the project “ Delivery for Mr. Assange” by the collective !Mediengruppe Bitnik, giving shape to a live 32-hour mail art piece. The journey follows the packet switching between different hands, bags and post offices. It is followed by interested persons amid tense moments of blackout. And when the mysterious box arrived at Assange (previously contacted by the collective) a live performance began, displaying video messages like “Justice for Aaron Swartz” and “Transparency for the State! Privacy for the Rest of Us!”. If the basic empirical question (which has kept followers connected to Twitter even at night) is: “Will the parcel arrive at its destination or disappear in the maze of Royal Mail?”, the broader conceptual framework in which the project is situated includes reflection on the transparency of information. Assange is the emblem of the debate between closed information systems – dominated by copyright and monopolies of influence – and open information systems, in which information circulates freely. The invitation to follow the journey of the package step by step is a call to analyze the mechanisms of transmission, access and manipulation of information, awareness of which should be part of the constitutive definition of every democratic society.
Ylenia Cafaro
Delivery For Mr. Assange
