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.
In front of 154/156 rue d’Aubervilliers in Paris, the artist Pascal Boyart has created a mural that represents a reinterpretation of the famous painting by Delacroix “La liberté guidant le peuple”. The architecture of the image faithfully reflects the original 1830 version, re-contextualizing it with the latest revolts of the “gilet jaune”. The work was made on the occasion of the tenth anniversary of the generation of the first Bitcoin block. In fact, the image conceals a “cryptographic rebus” – some details of the work represent a “seed phrase”, that is a combination of words that decode a private key of a wallet containing 0.288.76769 Bitcoin (about 900 euro). The puzzle was solved on January 13, 2019, and the words are: “banquier usure mensonge peuple combat espoir union citoyen conduire triomphe horizon jaune” (Banker wear lie people fight hope union citizen drive triumph horizon yellow). Like other previous works by the artist, this one reports a QR-Code Bitcoin signature, useful for crowdfunding but also as a sure artistic “signature”. The technology of the blockchain is here celebrated as a screaming instrument of emancipation: for citizens, from the general system of usury and lying, as declaimed by the words that form the seed phrase; for the artist into the art market, finally free from intermediaries thanks to the QR-Code Bitcoin. Perhaps too much, this proclamation leaves the observer disenchanted and curious about the future scenario in which the Marianne de France will act as an unconscious “testimonial”. Chiara Ciociola
Fresque Liberté – Delacroix inspire Pboy – JT 19/20 France 3
