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.
Designed by Jason Nelson, Speech / Media is a digital experimental poetry project, which, through the use of software, results varied media sources including speeches, music, recordings, films, radio programs, crowd noise or of 'ocean, making them merge into a single poetic text, which follows its original order, but in which some words have been removed, the lines broken, enjambement playfully manipulated and in which the only change is the addition of a few textual allowed conjunctions or prepositions, subtle corrections in grammar or punctuation, and finally into a system of securities in order to give the mixture a chaotic structure of the whole. "Can These technologies be used to reveal meanings?" asks the author – and the issue is not new, since that technology offers us the ability to translate various works in digital format and media, how can we contextualize and decode the new concepts and experiences derived from contact with new media ? How does new media art has influence on us and how we interpret it? Explore the relationship between new and old media and see the future is possible, unless you look through "the mirror" means any new medium creates a new environment and incorporates in itself the previous (McLuhan), as has been highlighted also-Bolter Grusin (1999) who identified the trend of new media to "re-mediate" the existing ones, as well as recently by Lev Manovich, who was able to show the revision and updating in digital form the conventions of photography and film, pointed out that the digitization of culture does not lead to the emergence of new artistic forms, but rather a redefinition of the previous ones, probably because the bits are bits (Negroponte).
