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.
Latest generation smartphones compete in the market with exceptional performance strokes. That is how these little objects have become the guardians of all our passions; doors open to the near and far world, all in one pocket. With our phones we keep in touch with friends, check e-mail, pay parking, listen to music and make photos….tons of photos. It’s about 900 billion images taken in a single year and abandoned on some hard disk, sent to relatives and friends or retouched to perfection to Instagram or perhaps for one of the many competitions for photographers without a camera. And it’s already a competition. The most beautiful photo, the most appreciated one, the weirdest one, the right one. But who is to decide? A jury? No, now there is Trophy Camera v0.9, a device that thanks to the work of developers Max Pinckers and Dries Depoorter, uses an algorithm that has allowed him to “learn” the rules that dictate the success of a photo from the photo archive of the world’s most illustrious photojournalism prize: the World Press Photo Award. When a user clicks on Trophy Camera, the algorithm begins its careful work and if the photo taken exceeds at least 90% of the pre-set standards, it goes to the site of the project, the only place where you can review the winning photos, given that the equipment doesn’t return images preview but only names and percentages. No doubt or controversy, but a mere rational evaluation that artificial intelligence is not afraid to apply systematically and tirelessly, with no exceptions or nuances. The fully autonomous standardization of a canon of beauty and perfection, or better yet, of victory. Choosing what’s “best” today is extremely easy… just a click. Benedetta Sabatini
