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.
Plöttner Verlag Gmbh, ISBN: 9783862110483, 2011, 256 pages, English
Although self-proclaimed states are not a new concept, not even in art, the “NSK State in Time” established by the Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK) in 1992, was one of the most consistent and historically remarkable experiment. In fact it came out as a supreme expression of freedom in the beginning of the collapsing ex-Yugoslavia, creating a boundless state and issuing very plausible passports which were even used in the attempt of crossing borders. The whole process has continued as one of the most distinguished projects of NSK, being then characterized by its shift to internet. In fact the establishment of the nskstate.com platform in 2001 enabled NSK citizens to share and build different initiatives which led to 2010’s first NSK Citizens’ Congress at the House der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, whose comprehensive documentation is edited in this book. Moreover this process has been very consistent with NSK tradition. As Monroe underlines, the central concept of the majority NSK actions is improbability. And the outcome of this seminal congress is perfectly consistent with that, including all the contradictory conceptual tangents, the emblematic case of surge of passports request by Nigerian people (very well articulated by Inke Arns) till the accurate final declaration. Monroe at some point cites the “ambiguous pleasure of identification with the State” and the multifaceted outcome from the delegates composes this identification in a plethora of personal and collective conceptions of the State, reinforcing this beautifully Utopian and time-enabled “space.”
