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 accelerated microparticles being studied at the CERN institute in Geneva cannot be viewed with the naked eye. The difficulties faced by potential physics fans to understand the experiments have stimulated an artwork entitled “Sponge Ball Pneumatic Acceraltor”. Artist Niklas Roy has responded #to the call from #the curator of the Tschumi Pavilion, the transparent exhibition space located in the middle of some crossroads in the Dutch City of Groningen. The installation emulates the mechanism of a particle accelerator using a number of items: 1000 black sponge balls placed in two large transparent bubbles, a vacuum cleaner, 150 meters of pneumatic tubes, infrared sensors and an Arduino controller. When the sensor detects someone, the vacuum cleaner is switched on and the balls start squirting from one bubble to another due to the difference in air pressure in the pipes. It is possible to continue the experience by placing one-hand on the multicolour sensors, a gesture which reverses the direction of the balls. At this moment it is possible to see the balls and to discern their path as they slow to a halt. Once removed the balls flip direction again and speed up to a velocity of around 4m/s. Describing his work, the artist says: “I decided to construct a machine which would bring the tremendous joy of particle acceleration to everyone.” The coloured lights and the large rotating arrow that indicates the sensor recalls the aesthetics of a funfair. Even the gesture of placing the hand on the sensor seems connected to this imagery. As with lie detectors, the work seems to envisage the possibility of a new mystery-free science. It is transparent, as simple to understand as a vacuum cleaner and open – the code that governs the installation is available as a free download. Chiara Ciociola
Pneumatic Sponge Ball Accelerator – An installation at Tschumi Pavilion, Groningen
