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.
In the “Data Shop” installation, lots of colored tin cans are placed on shelves, similar to those normally used in supermarkets, perfectly ordered by colour in columns, as if they were encased in a structured matrix. The graphics on the →
There are many photographic artistic devices, built in recent years to critically analyse the intromission of new technologies in the photographic aesthetic process. Prosthetic Photographer is one of these: thanks to machine learning training this device learns to recognise pictures →
A 1950s-style Bakelite telephone is the core of the installation by Stephanie Cormier and Dave Dyment for Untitled [Eavesdrop]. However, the strong retro aesthetic of the work conceals a conceptual technological short-circuit. Inside the device there is a smartphone that →
“Why did I leave social media?” French artist Thierry Fournier presents a 32 minute video series of people who have spontaneously decided to abandon or disable their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat as they are too harmful and evil →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816676156, Language: English, 312 pages, USA, 2011
Remixthebook is defined by its author Mark Amerika as “(a) speculative play”. Presented as a book, its uniqueness resides in an interconnection between concepts, experiences, accidents and →
RE/Search Publications, ISBN-13: 978-3902796028, 240 pages, English
This is the third anthology after “Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?” and “Pr0nnovation?: Pornography and Technological Innovation” to expand on and “archive” →
We generally think of surveillance as a detached gaze, a remote form of watching. The fact that cameras record information continuously and unobtrusively somehow makes their presence elusive. And the idea of data being →
Edições Nodar, Nodar 003
This thick book, coming with two CDs, is the outcome of a three-year program of international sound art residencies made by twin brothers →
The project of Richard Vijgen Deleted City is an interactive data visualization of the myriad of data hosted on the free web hosting Geocities, that was very popular at the dawn of the →
The MIT Press
, English,
464 pp.,
ISBN 978-0262014960
This book is a small gem among the many dealing with the history of media art. Stephen Jones has undertaken an excellent and extensive →
