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.
book – MIT Press – ISBN 9780262062749
Some years ago, Lev Manovich called for “software studies” to be established as an interdisciplinary field capable of re-thinking programmable media at the interface of cultural theory and computer science. Conceived partly against so-called speculative accounts of virtual reality and cyber-identities, this suggested re-orientation aimed for a denser materiality by foregrounding the technical composition of digital systems. Here, engineering documents were as likely a source of inspiration as Gilles Deleuze or Marshall McLuhan, resulting in a ‘material turn’ constituted by highly engaging work such as Alex Galloway’s protocological network theory or the more recent forensic hard drive analysis of Matthew Kirschenbaum. Software Studies: A Lexicon, edited by Matthew Fuller, should be considered as explicitly positioned in relation to this transition and its concerns. In a sense, the collection represents a broad mapping of those next generation programmer-theorists who have worked to establish this newfound rigor and sophistication. According to Fuller, there are two main reasons behind the title: it takes the form of a series of short studies, geared toward the stuff of software “in some of the many ways that it exists, in which it is experienced and thought through, and to show, by the interplay of concrete examples and multiple kinds of accounts, ‘the conditions of possibility’ that software establishes”. Secondly, it does so by applying perspectives from fields or disciplines that have traditionally had little concern with software directly, like philosophy, history or visual cultural studies. Comprised of dozens of entries around keywords (i.e. algorithm, codex, function, glitch, function, loop, variable), this lexicon provides a fascinating overview of an emerging field. With contributions from Jussi Parikka, Wendy Chun, Florian Cramer, Warren Sack, Adrian McKenzie, Nick Monfort, Friedrich Kittler, Olga Goriunova, Alexei Shulgin and Graham Harwood, Software Studies is an excellent and timely reference for artists, programmers or theorists who regularly work on or through the everyday code of digital machines.
Michael Dieter
