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.
Draws to a close in various places of the Ljubljana Festival Break 2.2 , an event that articulated theme this year is 'Invisible Threat', including all those activities which are not visible to some intrinsic hazards, biological viruses to radiation, the effects side the supervision and persuasive power of the media. The exhibition includes 'Consumertopia' Andrew Bucksbarg, the combination of consumer capitalism-with the mouse rollover, 'Great Balls of Fire' by Leon Grodski, September 11 saw a lounge, 'Stealth' by Aleksandar Jestrovic-Jamesdin, on 'ominimo impregnable U.S. plane shot down in Belgrade in 99' Mosquitobox 'Oliver Kunkel, a box of mosquitoes that have sucked the blood of HIV-positive,' Horror Chase 'Jennifer & Kevin McCoy, who reconstructs the random velocity loop of the scene' tracking of the horror film 'Evil Dead 2', 'Remain in Light' by Haruki Nishijima, the catch-sound waves with screen presented at Ars Electronica, 'Little Virus' Helene von Oldenburg & Ellen Nonnenmacher, on the design and the 'placing a biological virus in society contempornea,' Interactive audio installation for cable, hand and flash 'of Sergey Provorov & Galina Myznikova, dispersive effects of electricity,' The Voyeur 'by Kathrin Pohlmann, a video about his family watching a porn film, 'Invisible Threat: Home' Rene Rusjan, about the dangers that lurk in the walls of the home and 'Under Surveillance?' Tina Smrekar, an installation in which statistical data are crossed with interviews with ordinary people of Leipzig and London about being exposed to continuous surveillance. To complete the full program a symposium attended by, among others, Beatriz da Costa, Brooke Singer and René Passet, live videomixing Mike Hentz, 'spi', a concert that overlaps the encrypted transmissions Secret Service on shortwave and cryptic messages of the oracle of Delphi, 'Recoil' Katherine Moriwaki (USA), where clothes are stuffed with magnets attract involuntarily wearer 'In-Sight No. 3, Reality Soundtrack' Tao G. Vrhovec Sambolec, an intervention radioriproduttori sound through the city, and finally workshop of Christian Humbert Droz and the Institute for Applied Autonomy.
