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.
Anyone who has gone through New York in recent months may be unaware of Heather Dewey-Hagborg‘s Stranger Visions. This is a project that exacerbates the concept of surveillance, allowing it to creep into our most private and intimate sphere: our genetic profile. The artist has engaged with picking up hair, cigarette butts and chewing gum from roadsides and public places, before extracting DNA and inserting the data obtained into software able to reconstruct the facial shape of the owners of the organic material. Using a 3D printer, she has transformed those residues in real portrait sculptures. This provocative gesture questions the extreme ease of finding and manipulating an individual’s genetic information: each of us continually leaves around biological traces that are very easy to steal. It’s part of our nature as embodied subjects – there is no consensus that you can refuse to sign, no form for choosing not to enter personal data. The storage and handling of genetic information is a reality that today has practical implications in medical science and forensics activity. Stranger Visions is fearful of the involution of this reality in a scenario that seems sci-fi, but is already dramatically possible, a scenario in which it’s easily possible implement the most radical of identity thefts: cloning and genetic determinism. For Dewey-Hagborg the situation is extremely delicate, so much so that on her blog she expresses some doubts about the open source release of the software used to reconstruct faces – imagine the possible uses!
Ylenia Cafaro
Stranger Visions, Somatic Traces Of DNA
