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.
A Sonic Bike is a bike that plays sounds following the cyclist’s movements and speed, thanks to two speakers positioned on the front under the handlebar and a geo-referenced audio tracking system via GPS. The generated sounds are mapped to the surrounding environment and in continuous dialogue with the cyclist’s path: his journey becomes a real score. The first Sonic Bike is an open research project and was created by Kaffe Matthews in 2008. Over time, lots of variations of these special bikes have been generated, in different territories and contexts, such as “The Marja trio”, which explores the soundscape of the port of the island of Hailuoto in Finland. The project has been developed over time so much so that it evolved to become the Bicrophonic Research Institute (BRI). Environmental Bike is one of the latest evolutions of this research: it is a Sonic Bike that creates music by sonifying (and collecting in real time) data on the polluting particles detected in the areas crossed by the bike. The process was pioneered in Lisbon through a performance led by sound artists Lisa Hall, Kaffe Matthews and Federico Visi, with hardware designed by Sukandar Kartadinata. Local cyclists used the Envibikes while wandering around a part of central Lisbon. Each bike returned sounds (and analysis) of different gases: pressing breathing patterns of hyperventilating cyclists, alarming choruses of fog horns were the sentinel sounds of banks of polluting particles crossed by cyclists, to name a few. Even in the crevices of clean air, a calm female voice has not abandoned the riders, illustrating in great detail the damage of pollution on human health. At the same time, the collected data were stored and visualized to map the most polluted points of the city. An Envibike is a number of things therefore: a sustainable means of transport in its traditional form; an aesthetic representation tool, which plays the score of the surrounding environment; and a sensor that is useful to the community, collecting data that otherwise would not be available. And this vision could perhaps expand into other dimensions: could collective bicycle performances be organized in dialogue between polluted and non-polluted places? And furthermore, why not use the collected data as an open, public and shared resource for future urban planning? Chiara Ciociola
Environmental Bike live sonifying air pollution as you ride.
