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 construction of the space implemented by the interface standard is given by a sequence of structures that are alternated in the vision of the user. These same structures disappear when not in use to reappear as needed, supplying the same user of the holes conceptual needed to properly orient the operation of the machine. The memory of the machine itself is conceived as partly temporary, active in the presence of electricity, and partly a long-term or mass, able to recall data and functional sequences of events. What is missing is the memory of the user's choices, especially from a visual point of view, ie the menu and clicks that are profusely made every day, and are the joints of long work sessions. If you review these choices in a video gives an alienating effect, observe them overlapping abstract in basic components, allows us to reflect on the same mechanisms interface. Three Buttons by Jan Robert Leegte, once again focuses his attention on the mouse and its central role in the choices. The three buttons on this website does not lead anywhere, but immortalize the exact spot where they were pressed, leaving the printed image of the pointer. The author has previously experienced with this type of mechanisms, such as in MousePointer or conversions of architectural sites , but what stands out in Three Buttons is the preservation of the memory of the choices, that is what the user decides from time to time . It all leads to a compression of the time, as the past (the choices made) becomes perceptible as present, having the same graphic form, and is superimposed on this real, in a synthesis that reformulates, as is typical of the arts media, temporality according to the perception.
