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.
CD – Farpoint
“For intelligent machines to work, we must reduce the world into numerical data sets that support databases and algorithmic operations”, claims Arash Akbari. He expands on this by underlining that the physical world is often forgotten in this computational process, “we simply become quantitative values in a specific time and place” and consequently “forgotten stories and lives are added to data sets as inert numbers”. With an attached 32-page book, with images by Arash Akbari himself along with poems by Christopher Doherty-Ingram, Amnestic Continuum is a refined and critical multidisciplinary project which employs data sonification, data visualisation, and literature, to analyse the unseen external effects of the increasingly hegemonic nature of calculation and automation within contemporary society. Arash Akbar, an Iranian transdisciplinary artist, is no stranger to the mixing of dynamic art systems and forms in his efforts to maintain coherency between the physical and digital worlds. He approaches social facts from an emotional and participatory perspective, focusing on computational processes and ‘real’ life simultaneously, and in doing so, creates a sensitivity to the context and subjects behind the numerical sequences. The result is an elegant and rarefied electronic experience, based fundamentally on drones, yet delicate and rich in poetic interpretations. The sounds possess their own beauty and can be appreciated without necessarily engaging with the philosophical or technical concepts that inform them. Each track hides some form of data that testifies to various real-world events – a sort of cybernetic realism containing a paradoxical meta-plot that incorporates poverty and inequality indicators, data on urban disorder and violence, carbon dioxide emissions statistics, and a dataset based on fatalities from terrorist attacks. Thousands of events overwhelm us. This is a different horizon from the usual one that we, as Westerners, normally think that the art, culture and activism of the Islamic world opens up – all elements which are, for this artist, a form of raw power and expression.
Arash Akbari – Amnestic Continuum
