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.
Have you ever wondered how you could get paid for the unpaid labour you do for social media giants? We are still far removed from any fair reward for enabling companies like Facebook or Google to make huge profits. If we are ever to get that reward, something will have to change. The Belgian sisters Bénédicte and Laure-Ann Jacobs, artists working under the name LarbitsSisters, have created an elaborate campaign for the reclaiming of value of user-generated data: The Bitsoil Popup Tax and Hack Campaign. BitSoil is a lovely poetic pun on the notion of data being the new oil. The campaign consists of different layers and happens both offline and online. The LarbitsSisters employ a very smart combination of strategies. A particularly interesting one is the use of Twitter ‘prospector bots’ to approach potential claimants. The bots respond to a set of keywords. They invite Twitter users who use these words to visit the Bitsoil Popup Tax and Hack Campaign website to calculate the value of their social media data and make a claim towards the relevant companies. These claims are still made quite innocently by the LarbitsSisters sending postcards for you to, for example, Mark Zuckerberg, but one can also send a postcard to your national politician responsible for possibly supporting such a claim by creating new legislation or putting pressure on the industry. The Bitsoil Popup Tax and Hack Campaign is also an attractive visual work. The artists have created an installation that spits out Bitsoil paper cash, the Bitsoil Republic. It consists of a group of large imposing black printers endlessly churning out a visual proof of the value created by social media users. The sisters however also approach the audience directly. At the last Brussels Internet Yami-ichi (Internet Black Market), Bénédicte and Laure-Ann Jacobs had a stand in which they personally helped you calculate the value you generate, and they symbolically paid you for your services afterwards. I have a nice stack of Bitsoil on the table behind me now. Hopefully I can one day turn them into real profit. Josephine Bosma
Larbitslab – The BitSoil Popup Tax and Hack Campaign
