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.
The Bastard Pop is one of the few radical movements that have managed to shake the system of industrial music to its roots, managing to discover the Pandora's box of copyright in all its paradoxical contradiction with contemporary technological, being able to communicate to anyone in unequivocally. The vast scene of creative plagiarism of pop music has already shown signs other than just the plaything with the respective software, however, instructive and entertaining, placed on trial, a compilation on behalf of Amnesty International , helping to reclaim the legitimacy of an artistic practice. A new striking case is made public by The Grey Album , an album printed and distributed in a limited edition of 3,000 copies, which synchronizes with talent and precision to the sounds of the 'White Album' by the Beatles with the voice of rapper Jay-Z, made by DJ Danger Mouse . After being distributed in several independent stores (including Fat Beats and Hiphopsite), with considerable success, came the expected letter 'cease and desist' from the EMI, which protects the Beatles recordings on behalf of Capitol Records. The author has agreed to discontinue the distribution and sale of its product without taking legal action, losing perhaps a good opportunity to put in a strong way the legitimacy of the techniques of mash-up, in front of a work so sophisticated. His album gray retains the double meaning of intermediate color between black (white) and black (black) of the two originating products, and territory marginal and poorly attended (gray area). And in confirmation of this prophetic name, physical copies now populate real and fake ads on Ebay, while the respective files multiply freely on peer-to-peer.
