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.
We don’t need to resurrect McLuhan to notice whole armies of technological prosthetics surrounding us. If we stay on a symbolic level there are countless, but even if we restrict our search to the corporeal level there are still a lot. With an aesthetic that can all too easily be ascribed to the ‘cyberpunk’ imaginary, the work Offline Eye / Wi-Fi Organs by Wu Juehui consists of a pair of converted Video Glasses. These come equipped with a 3D printed spherical camera that transmits via Wi-Fi to the video glasses. The spherical camera is programmed to “fall every 30 seconds”. The artist is technically trying to answer the question: “what if our eyeball could leave our body but continue to transmit information?” The answer is not clear, but the artist suggests some possible test subjects, such as carrying the camera in one’s hand or throwing it in the water, or from the top of a skyscraper, producing an intense “out-of-body” experience. Wherever it goes, the wearer will feel a dislocated presence, unconfirmed by the rest of his body. This creation of a close but free-to-move visual prosthetic is totally novel. Conceptually it could be defined as a reverse engineered drone. The user has relative control over the eye, but the lens goes down, never up, providing ‘falling’ or ‘profound’ visions, which ultimately tend to mean closer and detailed, instead of aerial and panoramic. And this kind of spatially extended vision is not necessarily ‘empowering’ for the individual, although it certainly expands his visual field, and in turn his perception of reality. Offline Eye is part of Juehui‘s Organs Project, comprising other devices which extend our senses at the same time as limiting them through the constrains of their own ‘heavy’ technology, and in a way alluding to the ultimate limitations of our wish to technologically extend our senses.
