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.
The latest edition of the Olympic Winter Games held in Sochi will perhaps be better remembered for the international controversy surrounding the racial and homophobic (im)positions of the Russian Government than for the sporting events and the athletes involved. Reports of beatings in public places and the suicides of gay teenagers bullied by their peers at school often appear in newspapers around the world. And although there are 13 states in the world that allow gay marriage, there are many more (over 70) in which homosexuality is a crime punishable by sentences ranging from imprisonment to death. In the international framework of the third millennium, comes the site Gay-Check-Online which scans faces to determine sexual orientation using the webcams of connected users, a process taking approximately 10 seconds. Using a facial recognition algorithm (similar to those used by Facebook), the faces of users are examined to look for common traits in homosexual people. For those interested in trying the service personally it might reduce the chances of engendering some deep crisis of sexual identity to know that the result will always be: “Congratulations: You are gay!”. Gay-Check-Online, according to statements made by the author, is not intended to be a practical tool, but rather something ridiculous that parodies homophobic attitudes. The attempt to understand the sexual orientation of a person by observing aesthetic traits has no scientific underpinnings and recalls, with a nice dose of critical cynicism, the Nazi methodologies for research and the preservation of the Aryan race.
Benedetta Sabatini
Congratulations: You are gay!
