Neural.it :: media culture, hacktivism

art . privacy . psychogeography

Global Safari (Powered by Google), the formation of the world's image

Global Safari, Wellington Cançado, Renata Marquez, global_safari_2.jpg

"Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man" Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known 1983 book "Towards a Philosophy of Photography" which analyzed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images to posthistorical, technical ones. No longer formed by "authors", but by anyone who operates a camera or other apparatus, technical images have been opening windows to ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 01:43 PM - Sep 1/2010
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dvd . media . music

VV. AA. - Twisted Cabaret

Volvox, VOL0902, France, 2010, twisted_cabaret.jpg

cd+dvd Volvox, VOL0902, France, 2010
This is a collection of music and video (on cd and dvd) tracking artists that are altering or simply using codes from what has been known as the "Weimar Cabaret." This Cabaret included burlesque, darkness and comedy, and while its practices ended decades ago, its legacy can be found here in the form of modern music video artifacts. Culturally this is an environment that pushes on a theatrical and ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 25/2010
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art . interactive . visual

Phase = Order, escaping the screen

Phase = Order, Joris Strijbos, phase_order.jpg

In the field of expanded cinema the two-dimensio- nality of the projection screen has long been a limitation that artists have attempted to overcome through many different strategies. Rotterdam-based Joris Strijbos, member of the ensemble Macular, has found a way to take audio-visual media out of its habitual constraints. Recovering the legacy of ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 23/2010
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book . media . music . sound

Frances Dyson - Sounding New Media: Immersion and Embodiment in the Arts and Culture

University of California Press, 2009, English, ISBN-13: 978-0520258990, U.S.A.
The most obvious link between sound and new media is that both are immaterial. Obviously there's more, especially through combination. Frances Dyson goes well beyond this point, adopting an interesting and original strategy: she argues that new media represents an "accumulation of the auditive technologies of the past." Specifically, she methodically examines ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 13/2010
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art . music . sound art

Electromagnetic soundscapes, revealing the hidden environment

Wire Less, Yann Leguay, Wire_Less_Yann_Leguay.jpg

All around us the air is filled with silent signals. Our bodies bathe daily in streams of electromagnetic waves connecting hundreds of networks in the growing family of wireless media. Yann Leguay has been working with The GhostLab to establish a protocol for capturing radio frequencies spanning from VLF to UHF, including ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 11/2010
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book . literature . media

N.O. Cantsin - A Neoist Research Project

ISBN 978-1-906496-46-3, OpenMute, 2010, English
Forget about certainties. Forget about authors. Forget about fancy graphic design. Forget about colors. Forget about greyscale. Forget even about page numbers. This is a Neoist book and its content was meant to radically break the rules in the eighties. And it still does. It's a comprehensive anthology of Neoism through an abundance of writings and strictly black and white ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 9/2010
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art . media . music . performance

Interferenze 2010 Rurality 2.0 report

Check the Interferenze photo set here. The idea of the nonconformist as no longer the black sheep but the one now wearing a digital player and headphones admirably sums up the theme of the 2010 edition of Interference: "Rurality 2.0". This year the electronic arts festival was held July 23rd to 25th in Bisaccia, Upper Irpinia, a significant place for its (undoubted) rural features as well as it being home to ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 11:40 AM - Aug 6/2010
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art . book . preservation

Beryl Graham, Sarah Cook - Rethinking Curating: Art after New Media 

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013888, English, U.S.A., 2010
After fifteen years of recurrent and animated debates about the peculiarities of new media art, it is still almost always considered as inappropriate in terms of classic museum and collector standards. There is also the undisguised frustration of being snubbed by the majority of the contemporary art world. Here is the best chance to start to definitively solve this ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 12:44 PM - Aug 4/2010
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art . interactive

Tele-Present Wind, blowing somewhere else

Tele-Present Wind, David Bown, tele_present_wind.jpg

The wind is a universal natural phenomena, and it's usually associated with weather conditions and forecasts. But it is still perceived as almost unforeseeable and invisible except for its physical impact on plants and for its sibilant sound. Wind has two characteristics in common with the virtual environment: the complexity of conditions needed to be generated (so, often being unforeseeable) and ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Aug 2/2010
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dvd . music

Prélude au sommeil, Jean-Jacques Perrey & la musique électronique

Les Films d'un Jour, 2009, France, Francaise, English
Prélude au sommeil (Prelude to sleep) is a documentary film catching the spirit of Jean-Jacques Perrey, an eclectic electronic music pioneer who began his impressive career in the fifties. The film reconstructs the trajectory of a free spirit who flew to the USA with his early Ondioline electronic instrument (sponsored by Edith Piaf and Jean Cocteau). Perrey is often briefly interviewed, but ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 29/2010
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art . privacy

Desire of Codes, the tentacles of the surveillance beast

Desireof Codes, Seiko Mikami, YCAM, desire_of_codes.jpg

We're accustomed to being under surveillance. We've taken for granted that cameras are everywhere "for our own safety". And we don't care anymore of being recorded in the street 30, 60 or 100 times (or even more) everyday. How has it happened? One of the reasons is that all these cameras around us are "passive". They're there, they record their memory, then they delete ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 28/2010
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book . literature . science

Barri J. Gold - ThermoPoetics: Energy in Victorian Literature and Science

The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262013727, 2010, English, U.S.A.
There's an ethereal legacy between the nineteenth century (most of it was the so called Victorian era), science and technological innovation and the current digital age, almost two centuries after. Beyond recognizing the ancestors of technologies (the telegraph as the "Victorian Internet") and the subcultures producing fascinating atypical machines and settings (the steampunk ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 27/2010
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art . music . sound . sound art

RHFID Speakers, a different directional sound

Speakers are neutral. They carry the sound from its decoded source to our ears, but they are firm, static and impartial. They can be adjusted to create a better listening experience, or multiplied and singularly managed to enhance it even more, but they are meant to stay where you placed them the first time they were used. RHFID Speakers by Ulrik Andersen Hogrebe, Filippo Cuttica and ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 26/2010
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book . media . net

André Nusselder - Interface Fantasy: A Lacanian Cyborg Ontology

The MIT Press, English, ISBN-13: 978-0262513005, U.S.A., 2009
Psychologists have been rarely very helpful in understanding the most deep and intimate relationships between men and machines. At the end of nineties one of the early scientific books investigating this field out: "The Psychology of the Internet" by Patricia Wallace. It tried to analyze emotional emergences rising on the net, which were mainly caused by the new mediated type of ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 23/2010
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art . code . literature

Microcodes, the world without syntax errors

The descriptive, literary role of programming code has not being properly exploited, especially by writers and poets. Yet there's an incredible potential to create sense through the syntax and grammar rules of a programming language. Pall Thayer has started to rigorously write concepts in Perl in his Microcodes project. Slowly progressing from ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 22/2010
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art . book . science

Ingeborg Reichle - Art in the Age of Technoscience: Genetic Engineering, Robotics, and Artificial Life in Contemporary Art

Springer Verlag, Austria, English, ISBN-13: 978-3211781609
The laboratory as an atelier: this seems to be one of the paradigms of art and science. "Art" and "science" are two terms that have been juxtaposed way too often, sometimes describing either "creative" science or art only citing scientific elements. This book is far away from these misunderstandings. The work restricts its field of research to three areas (genetic engineering, ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 21/2010
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art . video . visual

Kapitaal, X-ray public space

In a black environment of shapes and garbled sounds someone is lurking. The viewer walks through an environment which could well be that of a first-person shoot-em-up videogame: a jungle of logos, text, bright displays and signs. It's not an imaginary place. It is an X-ray image of ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:00 AM - Jul 20/2010
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art . dvd . magazine . media . video

ASPECT - Volume 14: Middle East

dvd, VOL 14, FALL 2009, U.S.A., English
This is the usual excellent selection by Aspect (a bi-annual video-magazine on dvd) on a topic tough to explore: the Middle East. The format is usual: a collection of videos in a double version: the original work and one commented on by a renowned critic. Carefully avoiding stereotypes, focusing just on the hottest areas, and mostly including ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:00 AM - Jul 18/2010
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art . biotech . preservation

Modern Fossil - Fossilization now

Modern Fossil, Chistopher Locke, modern_fossil.jpg

Sometimes they have evolved. Sometimes they have only appeared briefly and then mysteriously lost all their functionality and appeal. Obsolete technological objects, once cutting-edge, turn into modern fossils in the hands of Chistopher Locke. With a special technique, a mold made of a concrete-like mixture similar to real fossil stone, the phone becomes a ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:00 AM - Jul 16/2010
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art . book . media . visual

(edited by) Alka Pande, Nils Röller - Visual Arts, The India Habitat Centre's Art Journal

Alka Pande, Nils Röller, Visual Arts, The India Habitat Centre's Art Journal, India Habitat Centre, volume 9, India, English, 2009, visual_arts_india_habitat.jpg

India Habitat Centre, volume 9, April 2008 - March 2009, India, English, 2009
How much we really know about artists using communication technologies in countries not deeply involved in the art market? Not much, of course, and just thinking about that gives the impression that we're missing out on a lot of culture. India is certainly one of these territories. Since the Dutch-Indian establishment of Sarai in New Delhi, there was an entry point in a country ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:00 AM - Jul 14/2010
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interactive . music . sound . visual

Otto, touching sound samples

otto, luca de rosso, otto_luca_de_rosso.jpg

Luca De Rosso offers to all those who have dreamed of manipulating a digital sample by literally touching it with their hands, a way to turn their dreams into reality. "Otto", the name of this small device designed and built by the Italian designer, is not a simple controller: it is a component integrating hardware and ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 08:00 AM - Jul 12/2010
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art . book . visual

R. Klanten, N. Bourquin, S. Ehmann, T. Tissot - Data Flow 2: Visualizing Information in Graphic Design

Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899552782, English, Germany, 2010
According to Olia Lialina: "Two ideas have occupied the minds of new media designers for several decades: humanization of computers and the materialization of digital phenomena." While the former is far from truly being realized, the latter is a huge trend, especially when it comes to data visualization. Quantities and relationships ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 03:01 PM - Jul 9/2010
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art . interactive . videogame

Sleep Is Death, video playing with humans

Jason Rohrer, Sleep is Death, sleep_is_death.jpg

Art games are usually meant to reconsider rules, but often this reduces to just playing with conventions. "Sleep is Death (Geisterfahrer)" by Jason Rohrer, famous for his early controversial "Passage" game, is a little masterpiece of interaction. It allows two players to construct a story, but in a revolutionary way: one of them is the "computer", the other one ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 05:50 PM - Jul 7/2010
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book . music . sound

Toy instruments - Design Nostalgia Music, from the collection of Eric Schneider, introduction by DJ Spooky

Mark Batty Publisher, ISBN 978-0982075487, USA, 2010, English
Square and compact, this book is reminiscent of an old tin box, like those used to contain ginger biscuits or other mysterious delicacies. From his personal collection, Eric Schneider has created this delightful collection of toy musical instruments from around the world. The earliest pieces ... [ Continue ]

Posted at 09:14 AM - Jul 5/2010
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