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.
Crispin Jones, winner of the 'Digital Art [Interactive] Division' at the Media Arts Festival in Tokyo in 2003 with the installation 'Social Mobiles' and author of brilliant projects such as 'An Invisible Force' (desks that respond to our questions) and 'Ideal ringtone' (the perfect ring, a fascinating synthesis of over 600 tones ring tones), provides further evidence of its provocative nature and highly ironic with the project ' electrophile, devotion rated '. This is a special keyboard designed specifically for quell'eterogenea and immense category consists of the fan, indomitable worshipers of different celebrities. The keyboard has the characteristic of having two screws embedded in each of the keys that compose it, and through these it produces an electric shock to the intensity of which is directly proportional to the number of characters that the fan used to write a mail to your beloved idol. The intensity of the shock conveyed by two poles / screws, is controlled by a circuit derived from a common muscle stimulator (anyone who is subjected to a treatment for muscular rehabilitation know what you are talking about), then there are big risks for Fans who decide to undergo this act of utter devotion. The strong appearance of design is not however this act of self-flagellation in itself, but rather the idea that an e-mail message to retain, in some recess of alternating binary, a memory of the pain with which the devotee has witnessed its unsurpassed love, an echo that it can be felt even in the home of the star turn of the email recipient. This idea of devotion distinguishes' electrophile 'the project' PainStation 'which also is based on the administration of electronic shock. In 'electrophile' pain increases with the number of characters of the email and then with devotion while in 'PainStation' is a challenge where the loser pays a painful duty. Pain and devotion Vs. pain and competition; modified games vs. devices "polarized". In both cases, the questions posed by the authors remain open, while, heedless of everything, electricity continues to go through regardless of bodies and machines.
