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.
Independent Curators International, ISBN 0916365719 If the trials of the relationship between sound and image have their roots in analog but equally effervescent seventies, many of those ideas are taken up and developed to mutate into new concepts, through the paradigms of digital technology. From the historical works of Nam June Paik / Jud Yalkut, Gary Hill and Steina / Woody Vasulka gradually transition to Robin Rimbaud / Scanner, the collective D-Fuse, Steven Vitiello, Atau Tanaka, Granular-Synthesis and Fred Szymanski, scanning many different aspects of that which binds the stimulation of the retina to that of the eardrum. From generation induced by one of two factors (the sound that affects the evolution of graphic design and vice versa) emulation of synaesthetic phenomena, from the sound made in its possible morphological characteristics of the voice, inextricably linked to the physical features of the person issuing it, this catalog , an expression of ' eponymous exhibition at Eyebeam in New York makes the combination of the sense of the images with the sound to which they bind. But, one wonders, this link is not always present in the current production of audiovisual works? In fact the link between image and sound that varies in time is ever more closely, but are multiple levels in which this 'tune' is far from 'symbiosis' here sought. From the soundtrack to the video and VJing (opposite ways to process before an item and then 'derive' the other), going through the process of realization of the installation, the two elements (visual and auditory) remain independent unless you want them bind within the process of creation. In this way their own genetic code turns to collect the alien elements of the counterparty, in a reciprocal mutation that eventually enriches both, innovating in unison.
