Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
CD – Entr’acte
Le liriche di Joseph Nechvatal, artista digitale post-concettuale e teorico dell’arte, avvezzo anche a inconsuete opere pittoriche e animazioni computer-assistite, spesso utilizzando virus informatici creati all’uopo, assumono in questo Destroyer of Naivetés: Computer Virus 1.0 le forme di una narrazione molto ovattata e passionale, adagiata su un tappeto di droni e strati sonori di matrice improvvisativa, non lontane da certe modulazioni jazz assai sperimentali ed evocative. Se il sottofondo sonoro evolve successivamente in più tenui e minimali cesure – semplici accordi di chitarra ripetuti – la voce rimane alquanto salmodiante e i testi ispirati da sregolate e dissolute enunciazioni. Si echeggia in qualche modo alla letteratura erotica seppure qui i temi trattati – ad essere precisi – sono quelli di sette storici dipinti dell’autore, risalenti al 1993 e compresi nel suo HyperCard Computer Virus Projec, un’opera che metteva in relazione l’epidemia di virus dell’AIDS e la crescente e prevedibile preoccupazione per l’aumento esponenziale dei virus informatici. Se gli immaginari della cultura hacker e il milieu nel quale certe azioni si concretizzavano o erano represse sono ancora caldi presso il grande pubblico dopo ben venticinque anni – si pensi al successo di una serie come Mister Robot – altrettanto si spera, forse, che a certe latitudini artistico-filosofiche le fascinazioni per temi burroughsiani come l’invasione virale, o baudrillardiani come il terrorismo internazionale e la cyber-pirateria, possano avere il loro definitivo colpo di coda. Il virus, ricorda Joseph Nechvatal, “è anche alla base di un processo creativo” e produce nello specifico bellezza e interesse dal punto di vista della storia della pittura. Riuscire a rendere questa visionarietà in una dualistica sovrapposizione di musica e testo forse oggi è volutamente una operazione fuori dai tempi, se alle parole (e diremmo anche alle idee) sono stati sostituiti procedimenti automatizzati, complessi e socialmente spesso poco controllabili. L’effetto finale all’ascolto è comunque fascinoso e ci riporta a una tradizione di testualità sperimentale e musica della quale avevamo perso le tracce.
Cave Bacchus, Joseph Nechvatal, Black Sifichi, Rhys Chatham – Destroyer of Naivetés: Computer Virus 1.0
