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.
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20.02.03 Art in Output, the appeal of lost data.
Art in Output, an international biennial on the intersection of art, technology and society, opened a few days ago at the Technische Universiteit of Eindhoven (The Netherlands). It’s one of the few exhibitions aimed at university students, this time more than 6.000, who are actively involved both in the making and the enjoyment of it, even to the point of having a special programme where they are picked up at their homes by a bus having on board the installation Hidden Track made by the group e-Xplo, from New York, where they are introduced to the main concepts to enjoy once arrived. This year’s theme is ‘Lost and Found’, and it consists in seeing data files as if they were lost objects in an airport or a train station, therefore taken out of the context of the original owner, to be given a new function or meaning by a new user. There will be a seminar dedicated to data loss where, starting from the disappearance of languages and documents in the Middle Age, will be described the modern strategies of conservation of digital works. The main feature of the festival is the exhibition of interactive installations: ‘You think therefore I am (following you)’, by the french Magali Desbazeille and Siegfried Canto, where, by crossing the steps of reflected passers-by, it’s possible to hear their thoughts; ‘Remain in light’, by Haruki Nishijima (Japan), with the famous butterfly net which can receive electromagnetic signals; ‘The giver of names’, by David Rokeby, where a computer tries to describe the objects around it using a shape recognition software and a word database; ‘S.N.O.W.D.O.M.E. reanimated’, by Jennifer Petterson, something like a souvenir glass ball where, instead of the falling snow there are slowly falling obsolete media (floppy, super8, VHS…); ‘Homo indicium’, by Ioannis Yessios, a collection of digital identities donated by the visitors; ‘Summoned voices’, by Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski, where phrases given by the visitors are assimilated and rewritten by the walls which, at last, have got their own memory; ‘DAP Disguises’, by Roel Wouters, a machine which can delete the informations about the user from unauthorised databases (marketing agencies, polls, providers, etc.). A particular attention has been paid to the site’s interface, made in Flash and using innovative navigation techniques, with a top bar which traces the followed path and an algorithmic design which communicates very well the feeling of the rich contents.
