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.
CD – Denovali
Today, digital communications, the proliferation of media, concerns for personal privacy, networked surveillance and the ability to hack networks, all generate particular previously unthinkable conjunctions in the relationship between individuals, institutions and communities. The topic of espionage is not a new trope for the culture industries, including music and art or cinema; however, an audiovisual performance that embraces all the above concerns has not been seen before Matthew Collings’ Requiem for Edward Snowden. As in the case of Edward Snowden, sometimes the act of conspiracy makes heroes of those who commit it. Espionage is mostly a twentieth century concept, but it returns here in a cyber guise. It is driven by an ideological and activist approach that feels duty bound to inform the public of “that which is done in their name and that which is done against them”. Published by the Magnetic North editions, Requiem is precisely this, an elegy by Matthew Collings, a well-known British art critic, writer, broadcaster and artist. Snowden revealed that we live in a world in which the privacy of our daily routines is completely compromised and this is a political act in itself, a sign of the times, an inescapable complaint about mass surveillance activities that we all should be concerned about. In the performative flow are elements that refer to a classical ensemble, with “hacked society” texts, along with glitchy and free form cuts, in a highly addictive edit, reactive and rather dramatic. The musicians-performers interact in real time with the visual apparatus wisely organized by Jules Rawlinson and everything reaches a significant emotional density. We do not know if the Requiem is also a funereal salute to totalizing US digitized democracy, but the impression that we receive is still very strong.
Matthew Collings – A Requiem For Edward Snowden (Trailer)
A Requiem for Edward Snowden, Preview 2
