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.
[R] – [R] – [F] Remembering, repressing, Forgetting ? a festival to more online? versions (this one? the 1.0), the result of the activity of co-ordinated international artists and curators. RRF, "Memorial project against the Forgetting and for Humanity", has the peculiarity of being born and living on-line and to be an art project that is based on the practice of networking, or rather, dell'artworking. The festival? developed, designed and programmed by Agricola de Cologne, artist and curator of art and new media expert active in Germany. The central idea? virtually to invite several international curators who specialize in the area of new media art, which in turn have selected a group of artists whose work is deemed related to the theme of the conference. The festival? particularly interesting for practical lattice which triggers: growing in the form of procedure in different versions, progressively combines the work of curators and artists chosen according to the central theme of the event. This process rhizomatic structure of life in a constantly changing always visible through the new nodes that are formed, highlighting the different memory and virtual connections. These, they go to characterize the structure of the festival and at the same time that the site that is up to generate a universe of collective memories in progressive network. Internet is used not only for its structural properties and performance, but also for its ability to be seen as an infinite database in which the memory is created, it disperses and relives. Among the editors of version 1.0, Fran Ilich (Mexico), Wilton Azevedo (Brazil), Anna Hatziyannaki (Greece), Branca Bencic (Croatia), Vincent Makowski (France), Eugeny Umansky (Russia), Catherine Davino (Italy), Agricultural Melody Parker Carter and De Cologne (Germany). Tatiana Bazzichelli
