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.
According to the story, when Lady Godiva used to ride naked trough the streets of Coventry, only the curious Tom was so brave to look at her, becoming blind because of this violation. From legend to cinema, history is full of interdicted to view areas. However it is not weird wondering if the voyeurism, the desire of seeing what is forbidden, is such a dangerous practice. Zone Interdite, an art project developed by the Swiss artist Christopher Wachter, in collaboration with Matias Jude, deepen the know-how on the topic, mapping the military restricted areas.The military world is hidden from civil society by fences and prohibitive signs; it’s real existence is a taboo. Nevertheless, we are still able to discover prohibited zones in our immediate vicinity, blackouts of a close but invisible reality, paranoia generators. This is the reason why, according to the authors, it is essential to get the control over this ‘Zone de Non-Penser’, in order to escape the psychosis of what happen in these invisible places. Inspired by Google Maps success, Zone Interdite reconstructs the terrain which our reflection has been deprived of on two different “LEVELs”: Level_01 allows the user to find the military restricted areas using a search engine (by country, by force, by full text) and an atlas, focusing them with the Word Navigator; Level_02 reconstructs particular areas as artificial virtual 3D worlds, that can be personally explored as a virtual walkthrough on ones own Computer (the Guantanamo prison as well as an Islamic training camp in Sudan are downloadable at present). The power of the project lies in disarming the military force of its censorious power, lighting up the shadow zones, those that till now peeping Tom could watch only though the keyhole.
Valentina Culatti
