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.
It is a matter of fact that in the Web 2.0 era people live their second existences diving into the so-called metaverse, the meta-universe populated by avatars as described by Neal Stephenson (1992). However, the progressive phenomenon of cyborgisation happens when people use prosthetic technology indiscriminately. What Danja Vassiliev has done with m/e/m/e 2.0 is to revert this trend bringing the machines into the world of humans. Developed as graduation project for the Media Design course at Piet Zwart Institute, the installation consists of a mechanical device made of 28 CD/DVD drives, which open and close via a web interface. A camera attached to the device sends pictures of the open trays back to the browser. In each tray there is a disc made of circuit board material and etched with various UI buttons. The pictures of these discs become image maps in the browser windows. As Vassiliev writes “Each plate is a unique “web page” parodying contemporary web 2.0 style with all its consumerist centered flavor”. The purpose the artwork is to make the users aware of the interconnection of the hardware and the immaterial by operating a mechanical server through an Internet browser application and seeing it unfold in front of them. As Andrew Yeaman (1994) argues “When a person gives self-control over to a computer and accepts the default options without question, that person has become a cyborg”. Critical of pervasive cyborgisation while working with same technologies, Vassiliev understands the necessity of diving into the machine in order to avoid the selfish mimicry of the cultural genes.
Valentina Culatti
