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.
Audio data cassette – ArtKillArt
In LogForData’s ProjectSinge several audio coding protocols are extracted from a 56k modem, fax machines and personal computers from the 1980’s. Texts of on-line conversations between the different members of an IRC channel are also included alongside this auditory data. Decoding the contents is only possible using a cassette player linked to a computer connected to the logfordata.net site. The tape has fifteen minutes of audio data streams on each side, respectively in French and in English. The accuracy of the tape player, the swiftness of the computer system and its Internet connection, then, determine the structure of texts and codes that are visualised on the laptop screen. ProjectSinge, an operating platform founded in 1998, is a creative group whose specificity lies on the verge of multimedia installation, performance, audiovisual diversion and the re-appropriation of obsolete technologies. LogForData draws us back to an era when information systems were beginning to mutate imperceptibly, before everything took a turn towards the uncontrollable and chaotic. The proliferation of data traffic is now a crucial issue: cloud services, the Internet of Things and increased mobility place new demands, while the transmission and reception of data technologies are continuing a wonderful adventure started at the dawn of the nineteen-eighties. Information is now a form of independent existence and digital entities previously only imagined have become full-fledged realities. Here the status of the format is questioned too: the cassette is only one part of a process; it takes more devices for the circuit to be completed. This takes the form of a sort of home-encryption that is the repository of ever-changing resolutions.
AKA10 – PROJECTSINGE – LOGFORDATA [french log]
AKA10 – PROJECTSINGE – LOGFORDATA [english log]
