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.
Anglia Ruskin University, ISBN-13: 978-0956560865, English, 80 pages, 2013, UK
“Public engagement” is a definition often used inappropriately to describe the effect of any public event with a not-completely-passive public. The Visualise program at Anglia Ruskin University and the Ruskin Gallery has instead embodied it fully with events that are rooted in the history of both the city and the university and deal with new and old media. Curated by Bronaċ Ferran, the program highlighted cross disciplinarity, which seemed to be at home in these spaces – as in, for example, the truly pioneering work in the sixties by Liliane Lijn and her Poem Machines, by Ernest Edmonds, with his generative software code in FORTRAN, and Alan Sutcliffe, with his experiments with computer music and poems, described personally in the respective texts. “Code” seems to be the unspoken common thread – it has been embodied by artists in very different forms like poetry, biology, electronic music, live performances and visual arts, and indeed in the “Poetry Language Code” exhibition, also part of the program. Eduardo Kac, in a previously unpublished text, talks about the latest conceptual embodiment of his “GFP Bunny” involving glyphs, conducting ink and sound and in the interview with William Latham there are more challenging concepts crossing discipline boundaries, like the “form-grow grammars”. Similarly, Giles Lane and David Walker deal with 3D printing from specific iterations of software generating natural forms, in a way closing the circle. This catalogue is a classic example of a combination of new and well-researched material, making it a precious addition to this area of study.
