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.
One of the most under-evaluated consequences of the multiplication of machine learning engines, and their production invisibly being embedded in our daily reading, is that the generated words, tones, lexicon, and structures will have an impact on our perception of the world, in the short and medium term, as language always has. From this perspective artist Jinwon Lee (eeezeen) has engaged with the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis – a linguistic theory, part of linguistic relativity, affirming that how we express a language has a direct influence on our thoughts and consequently to our perception and understanding of reality. Lee’s REVIEW project was developed under this premise. It applies those digital mechanisms through flesh and bones reality with a performer. In this version, a wandering girl is equipped with hidden electronics, a mini camera, attached next to her eyes, and a compact printer, mounted at the very front of her mouth, which prints out comments on what the camera, and the girl, observe. These comments are formulated ‘in a negative and distorted linguistic style’, elaborated by a machine learning model trained with similar language patterns, and hostile comments in various substyles expressed in various online communities. What seems a mere exercise of representation is instead an attempt to allow a moving body to embrace in the physical world the influence of abstract and anonymous humans behind ever-frequent, vile comments on social media – comments that are too easily published and which resonate across society. This cyborgian resulting body is specifically assembled, but it is universal at the same time, representing any of ‘us’, overwhelmed and subjugated by the aggressiveness of technologically enabled subtle intimations. The printer, then, seems to materialise the overflow of this suffered language from our own person, while the attached camera highlights the unavoidability of being exposed – dramatically manifesting our fragility in an inescapable, unsettling short circuit.
Jinwon Lee – REVIEW
