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.
OnlyFans, perhaps the largest website in the world where users can post content that is not allowed elsewhere, is a successful business model for monetising the increasingly consolidated like mechanism. On one side are the content creators – artists, personal trainers, influencers, sex professionals – and on the other are their fans, who are willing to pay for access to exclusive material or for ‘premium’ interactions, either by subscription or on a one-off basis. The more a creator is popular and produces sought-after material, the more they earn. The platform has 150 million users and the economic market available to the 1.5 million creators is more than $ 5 billion; a huge business that is often fought politically and culturally. In parody of OnlyFans, artist Lena Chen, influenced by her own experiences as a sex worker and thanks to her collaboration with Maggie Oates and Pippo Toof, has created OnlyBans, an interactive game where you can play the role of a ‘sex worker’ on a digital platform. The aim of the game is to post material and maintain relationships in order to build as large a following as possible and earn ‘money’, while experiencing the many pitfalls you face in the world of porn and social networking. The player will very soon discover how complicated it is to keep one’s profile active while being at the mercy of the platforms’ opaque algorithms and policies. The narrative of the game is accompanied by the testimonies (and real censored material) of real erotic content creators who share with the players some of the problems they face every day in their professional lives: Privacy risks, censorship, de-platforming, revenge porn. A game that tries to redraw the rights of sex workers and the boundaries of what is legal, and that does not fail to provide information on the correct use of digital tools and the many pitfalls hidden behind seemingly harmless habits. Benedetta Sabatini
Lena Chen, Maggie Oates – OnlyBans, do you wanna play?
