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.
Artist Brendon Dawes has produced a series of six devices that explore possible interactions between physical objects and the flow of receiving e-mail. The work was commissioned by MailChimp, the well-known email marketing platform. The six-object function uses the email communication protocol and consists of rethinking the positive aspects of these ordinary exchanges. The goal of this work is to contrast the obsession of “Inbox 0”: making the inbox empty in the name of efficiency and ecology of mind. The artist explores interactions caused by the use of e-mail in everyday life. Six Monkeys plays with notifications of arrival, changing the alert sounds of a relentless progression of unread e-mails. “Oliver” is a kind of abacus light that represents the filling of your inbox. “Lucy” is a cylinder that works with suffused colours brightening the arrival of email previously sorted by subject or sender. “Sarah” slowly shows a pop-up message when the receiver gets a message from a favourite sender. The other three items in the series are based on the function of e-mail storage and the memories they trigger (often intimate and personal) are transformed into physical artefacts. “Lana” is a white box about the same size as a paperback book. When it is moved slightly it transmits memories in the form of a random search from its files. “Ham” holds the user’s most valuable e-mails, able to reprint them at any time by simply turning a handle. And finally, if none of these devices are enough to exorcise the stress of continuous flow, there is “Nim” which switches off the flow of incoming emails. The devices are named after chimpanzee stars from scientific experiments on human language learning: hence the name of the opera, “Six Monkeys”. Beyond the clear link with the client, this reference could also be a reference to ancient research into the universality of language. Apparently this natural and persistent longing has transferred its field of interest from human beings to transmission protocols. As a result, e-mail may remain a solid bulwark, an unchanging milestone, as MailChimp will surely hope. In June 2014, the company sent more than 10 billion emails. Chiara Ciociola
