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.
Polity Press
, 2009
, 332 pages
, English,
ISBN-13: 978-0745640914
Finally available in English after eight years, “Optical Media” is an influential book by one of the major and more controversial media philosophers: Friedrich Kittler. The book is the transcript of a fourteen-lecture series he presented at Humboldt-University, Berlin in 1999, and it’s meant as a “popular exposition” (as John Durham Peters defines it in the revealing introduction) of a substantial body of work. It can also be described as a history of technologies used to transmit, process and store images – essentially looking at “light”. But, predictably for Kittler, this is not at all a sociological or economical history of technology. His idiosyncrasy in focusing on machines, hardware and engineering opposes all the humanist approaches (including McLuhan’s “media as extensions of men”), something that comes across strongly in the book (although he shares with McLuhan an affinity for making bold and outrageous claims). After a few chapters that concern the prehistory of optical media (a must for media archeologists), there’s a turning point with the analysis of “camera obscura”, the first device to enable optical transmission of information and optical storage. Based on Shannon’s information theory, Kittler’s analysis is always rich and involving, describing a complex path of theoretical and factual relations. The book goes on with inspired research on the history of photography, film and television and ending with the computer as a convergent medium, where all the optical singular media die in a new sublimation of the omnipresent “algorithm”.
