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 2008 edition of the Share Festival has already started in Turin, sporting a prestigious collaboration with Bruce Sterling as a guest curator. Entitled “Manufacturing” the festival is celebrating its fourth edition (after 2005, 2006 and 2007), with an emphasis on the producing concepts of design, in the frame of Turin world design capital in 2008. The conferences hosted by the Accademia Albertina (the Turin Academy of Art) start with the guest curator confronting with the architect Stefano Boeri and end with him again with the visionary architect Marcos Novak. Among the other conference speakers: Donald Norman, Julian Bleecker, Anne Nigten, Montse Arbelo e Joseba Franco, Mauro Lupone, Pierluigi Cappucci and Paolo Cirio. Furthermore a series of events have been integrated in the program, such as the screening of the famous “The Net” with its director talk, the presentation of “Fatherboard, The SuperAvatar” by Luigi Pagliarini, a live concert by Autechre + SND, the “Circo Ipnotico” project by Otolab, a meeting of the AHA mailing list and a second Netlabel Party. Finally, at the festival’s end, the Share Prize will be awarded to one of these projects: “Knife.Hand.Chop.Bot” by Emanuel Andel, “Virtual Identity Process” by D3D, “Tampopo” by Yamada Kentaro, “Sound Lathe workshop” by Owl Project, “SphèrAléas” by Scenocosme and “Delicate Boundaries” by Christine Sugrue.
