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.
Reading the news online, from the web to the mailing list to ultra-efficient flows in RSS (which allow you to have an instant Glance general from multiple sources) has become a daily ritual that is perpetuated even several times a day yourself in the feeling of be 'connected with what is happening'. But times of a tight production and use give rise to an unbridled consumption and bulimic, which often results in drunkenness information from which it is difficult to detoxify. To play with these concepts is News Reader , a program that generates text from a related news. The set of information has been gathered from Yahoo! News, but when you choose to read them in detail you can see several links associated with certain terms in the body of the text. These links do not lead to further deepening of the term or to a respective site, but to another window where there is a text generated by statistical models and alternative news from the 'Common Dreams'. The imperceptible transit based on the original text to the generated plasma as the concepts by giving a more clear and deployed. The software was produced by Noah Wardrip-Fruin (author of The New Media Reader and First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game ), David Durand, Brion Moss, and Elaine Froehlich, and is part of a couple of programs (the 'other is called Regime Change) equipped with a political approach to the distribution and reproduction of the texts. The ringed concepts in News Reader, through associations sensible and different accent compared to the original scenario, fails to fulfill a double function: move the point of view of the unique and aseptic major news portals and explore linguistically writing them. The result is fascinating, but its peculiarity is to invent better mechanically credible results, sometimes blatantly funny or visibly dramatic, taking advantage of the chains of language generation to enlighten us on his unconscious perception.
