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 surgical robot first appeared in operating rooms in the mid-eighties and since then has become established as a reliable and necessary presence, enabling more accurate and less invasive interventions for patients and reducing the risk of post-operative infection and healing times. Thanks to a computer and to a system for remote manipulation by a surgeon, the robot is able to reproduce the surgical movements of the human hand through mechanical arms. Currently the company Intuitive Surgical Inc. controls the market in robotic surgery, with more than 2,500 robotic systems sold worldwide. Their flagship product, the da Vinci® system, costs over 3 million USD. This is an exorbitant cost that only adds to the uneven distribution of public health services in which ordinary citizens are often unable to access healthcare and surgery. OpenSurgery, born from the collaboration of many professionals alongside experimental artist and designer Frank Kolkman, investigates the possibility of building DIY surgical robots as a more accessible alternative to expensive professional health services. The project aims to stimulate critical thought in order to challenge the current socio-economic framework. The OpenSurgery robots collide with the thorny issue of healthcare patents, most of which are held by private corporations who received some form of state funding. If these patents, on the one hand, safeguard the valuable work of many people, on the other, they prevent the development of more democratic alternatives. Kolkman presented his project at RCA’s Design Interactions without proposing to actually build a surgical robot ready for use, but demonstrating that there are possibilities to develop cheap, open source alternatives. (Photo Credit: Juuke Schoorl) Benedetta Sabatini
Frank Kolkman – OpenSurgery
