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 perceptual dimension of technological artworks has greatly improved in the last decade. For example, if the revamped virtual reality has the advantage of complete visual immersion and an escapist dimension, in a physical space it is certainly more difficult to engage the audience on a similar level of alienation. This is because when our eyes are no longer the main interface to the world, all other senses and the body as a whole, which takes in and decodes information on different levels, become the interface that is a target for engagement as complexity increases. However, in such spaces, specific communication environments can be created that reconceptualise the engagement of the senses and deliver an emotionally and perceptually balanced set of signals. Ocean Bloom by by Sandipan Nath,Sebastiaan Smink and Boris Acket is an audiovisual work that uses ‘sound holograms’ as ‘objects in space’. The artists were inspired by the concept of being caught in a ‘sonic storm’. They use 4DSOUND software to spatially explore the sounds while audience bodies move around and within the installation space. The software constructs sound that you can not only listen to, but that can also literally move around and through you. The constructed sonic environment is conceived as an underwater world and expresses an intangible materiality. The space, filled with thin, equidistant vertical speakers and programmable light projectors, becomes, in the artists’ intentions, a terrain of communication where the orchestrated sound and light events are meant to challenge and affect the separation between the human and the non-human in a space of possible understanding. Reminiscent of Montreal’s historic audio-visual scene, light and sound are used with ‘surgical’ precision, which is particularly effective in this ‘circular acoustic vortex’ meant to represent ‘the depths of oceans’. The perception of time and space coordinates varies through the intensity and duration of exposure to light and sound, allowing for different listening practices.
Sandipan Nath, Sebastiaan Smink & Boris Acket – Ocean Bloom
