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.
The title of this work “Can the Subaltern Speak?“ is borrowed from a famous essay by feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak published in 2008. Spivak discusses how there is no account of the controversial Hindu Sati practice, in which a widow sacrifices herself by sitting atop her husband’s funeral pyre. This leads Spivak to ask whether the ‘subaltern’ can speak. The subaltern is a category defined by Antonio Gramsci, and Spivak strategically situates it within post-colonial discourse. When the subaltern becomes the woman suffering violence at home, but unable to speak up, a single-handed gesture that can be used to alert others that they need help in person or over a video call. Behnaz Farahi makes an outstanding synthesis of these two concepts, using two masks, which are inspired by “Niqab” masks worn by women in southern Iran. These allegedly originated during the Portuguese colonisation to protect “pretty women” from the gaze of slave masters. Those two masks are equipped with multiple mechanical ’eyes’, and their eyelashes blink swiftly using “AI generated Morse code”. Farahi (also author of “Caress Of The Gaze“) expertly combines distinct elements. The encryption used by the machines merges seamlessly with obsolete and abandoned code (Morse code) to produce a level of communication which can’t be interpreted instinctually by a gaze nor rationally by a brain. The potential “subversion of patriarchy” it enables exploits the complexity of the machine, to overturn the balance of power. This is a reformulation of the wink, converted from predatory tool to tool to protect. It is also a mesmerising combination of an animal sensitivity triggered by the wink, a technologically enhanced gaze, and the underlying indecipherable messages exchanged by the machines. A ‘radical augmented gaze’ is created and is comparable to a prototype technology from the future, now rooted in the masked, fragile and digital present.
Behnaz Farahi – Can the Subaltern Speak?
