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.
Making the earth’s magnetism perceivable is an acquired skill that was originally developed for navigation purposes. Having to rely on the compass for orientation, seamen have been aware of the instability of the earth’s magnetic field for centuries, especially when navigating at high latitudes. Semiconductor’s Ruth Jarman and Joe Gerhardt have recently completed 20 HZ
, an audiovisual work that provides a striking representation of a magnetic storm occurring in the higher reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere. The storm was recorded by the CARISMA magnetometer array, a network of over two dozen stations distributed across Canada which monitor the fluctuations of the earth’s magnetic field. The artist duo first translated the data from the array into sound, producing familiar grains and glissandi typical of natural radio phenomena. Incoming solar winds carrying charged particles can be heard as warbling tones and thunderous clusters plunging into a backdrop of atmospheric pointillism. This aural matter was then translated into moving images, visualizing sound waves through the classic analogy of ripples on water, with the difference that the ripples here have sharp jagged ridges suggestive of high electrical charges. If reading a compass gives us information about the orientation of a magnetic field at a single point in space, just like listening gives us information about sound only at the location of our eardrums, visualizing the data from the CARISMA array, Semiconductor present us with a panoramic view on this invisible field, revealing a complex and dynamic landscape. Herman Helmholtz once wrote “The eye has a great advantage over the ear in being able to survey a large extent of surface at the same moment”. The scale of the phenomena that is made perceivable in this case extends in space to a distance several times the earth’s radius. But it’s not scientific rigor that makes the work of Semiconductor stand out. Exploring the scientific domain from an outsider’s perspective, they conserve a broad degree of freedom, following a poetic approach that keeps their work autonomous from any form of scientism.
Matteo Marangoni
