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 uncertainty on the nature of a written piece, that is, how much it looks ‘human’ even if it was generated by a machine, is one of the issues raised by text generation software. The refinement of the algorithms used and, consequentially, of the results obtained, has brought the Turing test (a method to test if an artificial text could be mistaken for a real one) out of laboratories and made possible to administer it directly to social systems. This is exactly what Jeremy Stribling and other two MIT friends of his have done with Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy, a research paper generated by SCIgen, a program designed to automatically generate computer science papers, complete with graphs, figures and quotations, which can be accessed through a web interface and is free to use and experiment with. Sensationally, the paper was accepted at the prestigious WMSCI, the World Multi-conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics. Even though none of the revisors explicitly approved it, none of them rejected it either, passing the judgement on and tacitly approving the plausibility of the paper. After the sensation, the paper was obviously removed, but its authors are now trying to secretly get in touch with other relators, offering them a reimbursement of the attendance fee (which they raised thanks to the donations of 165 anonymous web users) to gain access to the conference anyway and complete the stunt by actually presenting the work with all the seriousness required by the context. These textual generations could produce a completely new meta-language, a sort of ‘lexicon of plausibility’ where the signs of a radical mutation of linguistic structures, which are now the domain of machines, could be recognized.
