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.
edited by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński – Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, ISBN: 9788361587545, 192 pages, 2011, English, Polish
The “Third Culture” category refers to a seminal John Brockman book from 1995, in which the author examines the work of several renowned scientists who were communicating their new ideas directly to the general public (Brockman in return refers to Charles Percy Snow’s book from 1959 entitled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”, which illustrates conflict between humanities and science). This book contains the proceedings of the homonymous conference that was held in May 2011 at the Artus Court in Gdańsk (Poland) and organized by Ryszard W. Kluszczyński. He affirms in the introduction that “art can be, and frequently is, a domain and method of scientific research,” and he fosters the role of media art as one of the main interlocutors with science, for its proven research attitudes. The conference itself focused on the mutual relations between the three indicated domains of human creativity. The mutual roles of art and science (diverting sense and rigorously proving it at the same time) are constantly explored in the selected essays. They address a wide range of scientific disciplines (from engineering to biology, from mathematics to optics) and what they have in common is somehow hinted at in the introduction, in that they all establish a dialogue between disciplines, either by connecting diverse artworks by different artists or by digging brightly into media archaeology. These dialogues constitute an essential selection, illustrating art as embracing science in its pure (diverted, further innovated or re-engineered) processes.
