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.
During the past several years there was a significant increase in closed circuit television ans surveillance cameras in public space. Cameras pop up from outer walls, the top of ATM machines or traffic lights, capturing every move and submitting them to police officers and private security guards. Effectiveness of these devices in reducing crime is quite dubious, and cases of misuse by public and
private authorities have raised serious concerns in video monitoring in public space. The chance to discussing about this issue through Web 2.0 procedures is available on Flickr with a project called Panopticon: Pictures of Surveillance Cameras. Clearly, public space video surveillance represents a personal privacy intrusion. Moreover, there are uncertainties about who owns the tapes and who has the right to see them. Many cameras monitoring public space are privately owned. Banks, office buildings, and department stores are all routinely engaged in continuous video monitoring of their facilities and of any adjacent public space. Recordings are privately owned, and may be stored, broadcasted, or sold without permission, disclosure, or any engagement of the people involved. Similarly, video footage captured by police may be considered part of the ‘public record,’ so available to individuals, companies, and government agencies needs. At best, CCTV seems not to reduce crime, but merely to divert it to other areas. “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t have anything to hide” is a standard CCTV defense. And the logical consequence is that only bad people have secrets, therefore, to prove you are good, the police/government should know everything. But, everybody has the personal privacy rights. That’s why The Institute for Applied Autonomy (IAA), a technology research and development collective focused on the individual and collective self-determination, developed iSee, a web-based application charting the locations of closed-circuit television surveillance cameras in urban environments, to avoid them as much as people can and calculating alternative pedestrian itineraries. The intent of these projects is obviously provocative. However, it shows a trend in Web 2.0 related to a still unresolved issue: are we free prisoners in a Panopticon global cage?
Valentina Culatti
