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.
It’s very hard to resist the invitation to write something on the lunar surface. Moon, the work that brings together the untameable Ai Wei Wei and Olafur Eliasson allows you to do exactly this. Connecting to the website Moon it is possible to leave your thoughts about the moon on your screen, on a site already adorned with images and thoughts from people all over the world. After authentication you have access to a graphical editing tool that allows you to draw or write on a selection of lunar surfaces in black or gray (in a perfect lunar style). It is not the first collective image experiment. The most famous example is surely Communimage launched in 1999 by Johannes Gees: a huge single image formed from those added by users. On the website (still available) we find traces of different versions of this gigantic collection. Some of these are physical, obtained by printing the whole image or part of it. Others instead are constructed through some analysis of the image metadata that in this way assumes various and numerous shapes. Moon instead offers a unique tool of expression (the editor available to the users) and a magic environment (a moon in 3D). Unlike the constant mutability of Communimage, Moon seems to instead offer a safe space for preservation. According to the authors: “Through messages and non-verbal communication, in a language unique to each person, the collective work becomes a testament to personal freedom, creativity, and activity”. Moon presents itself as a place of memory. The collective creativity becomes a monument, although it takes the risk of electing the Network as the imperishable guarantee of its conservation, as if it is eternal and alert, like the moon, which is also ever-changing and bizarre. Chiara Ciociola
