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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23.04.03 Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time, 10th Digital Salon.
For its tenth anniversary, the international festival of electronic art ‘New York Digital Salon’ has organized a big celebration, with a team of curators and institutions who programmed a month of events, named ‘Vectors: Digital Art of Our Time‘, starting from April 22, in the new Winter Garden and in the Courtyard Gallery in New York. It will be opened by the ‘Digital Art and Culture Symposium’, with Roger Malina (executive editor of the magazine Leonardo), Christian Paul, Alex Galloway, Jon Ippolito, and Lev Manovich. During the next days there will be other debates, such as ‘About Space: Installation, Interaction’, with Bernhard Leitner and David Rokeby, ‘Artist as Programmer’, with John F. Simon, Jr., Andy Deck, Pamela Jennings and Maciej Wisniewski, ‘The museum and Art Gallery in the 21st Century’, ‘The New Narrative’, ‘New Media Performance and Music’, with Christina Yang, Ricardo Dominguez, Carsten Nicolai, Pauline Oliveros, Atau Tanaka and Kasper Toeplitz, ‘An evening with New Media Curators’ and ‘New Technology, Traditional Media’, where some artists who used ‘traditional’ media since the beginning of their careers tell how their creative processes have been transformed by technology. Among the exhibited works there’s a summary of ten years of electronic art with a ‘hall of fame’. Among the historic performances there are ‘Vectorial Elevation’, by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer and ‘IO_dencies’, by Knowbotic Research, the famous videos ‘All is Full of Love’, by Chris Cunningham, ‘Ever Is Over All’, by Pipillotti Rist, the installations ‘A-Volve’, by Christa Sommerer and Laurent Mignonneau, ‘Glasbead’, by John Klima and ‘Genesis’, by Eduardo Kac, the sound elaborations of ‘Memorandum’, by Ryoki Ikeda, ‘Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers’, by [The User] and ‘Ovalprocess’, by Markus Popp. There are also several works by ‘net.art heroes’, such as ‘ASCII History of Art for the Blind’, by Vuk Cosic, ‘Toywar’, by etoy, ‘Untitled Game (color version)’, by JODI, ‘The Web Stalker’, by I/O/D, ‘Will-N-Testament’, by Olia Lialina, ‘Natural Selections’, by Mongrel and the more recent ‘Vopos’, by the italians 0100101110101101.ORG, Bureau of Inverse Technology and ‘They Rule’, by Josh On. The concerts, too, are very interesting, with a performance by DJ Spooky and the Optometry Band, where the samples are mixed with avant-garde jazz voices, multimedia electro-acoustic improvisations by Phoebe Legere and Bruce Wands, live video and animations mixes by Paul Enriquez, an interactive telepresence installation by Ploops, the ‘Toy Symphony’ concert by Tod , with his interactive music playing toys designed at MIT and a concert-performance by Pauline Oliveros and the Deep Listening Band, where the musician and philosopher explores the humanizing possibilities of technology. Finally, the ‘Art and Technology Family Day’, a day for discovering digital art through a tour and hands-on activities for children and families, is surely innovative.
