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.
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262027489, English, 320 pages, 2014, USA
How much has the concept of the cloud-based ‘app’ socially and economically changed our daily lives, and how much critical thinking has been produced about that? Surprisingly, The Imaginary App is among the first books about the economy and the aesthetics of the app paradigm. Apps are often marketed as a “panacea” for problems (“there’s an app for that”, which is a “phantasmatic promise”, as Kluitenberg points out), they are actively downloaded in their billions from the cloud onto our intimate devices. Our hardware manufacturers exert total control, recording every single act we perform with and through our device. Doesn’t this sound like the perfect surveillance nightmare, sugarcoated by speed, efficiency and design interfaces? The first part of this book is dedicated to control and power distribution, including also a discussion of invisible filtering policies (described by Pold and Andersen). The second part focuses on the app as “virtual prosthetics”, exploring the question of “what a body can do” as Srnicek puts it. The third part explores the app economy and both the myth of making a fortune and the use of “stalking” tactics to obtain payments. Finally the fourth part of the book is about the app’s software nature and its role. There’s an appendix of “fake apps” concepts (maybe still a bit raw) from the book’s homonymous exhibition. Perhaps a gallery of successful scam apps (promising something technically impossible to do, but nevertheless bought by thousands of people) would have also been appropriate.
The Imaginary App
