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.
If social media had never existed, we don’t know if and when we would have had such a fragile media landscape where our judgement is essential to discern truth from falsehood. Mrinalini Singha & Haoheng Tang have developed a hybrid →
Sound walks have become a consolidated theory and artistic practice over time, with various acoustic devices enhancing or revealing participants’ listening abilities. In Embedded/Embodied, Farzaneh Nouri & Arash Akbari add a computational layer by training an artificial intelligence (AI) to →
This immersive reality experience, Symbiosis, created by the Dutch experience design collective Polymorf in co-production with Studio Biarritz, unfolds in a specially designed physical environment. Drawing inspiration from the speculative worlds of Donna J. Haraway – participants can choose to →
If ‘there are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew’, as McLuhan stated, where is the public opinion on climate change? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (interviewed in issue #26) provides an answer with Climate Parliament, which consists of thousands of →
Disnovation.org (Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska) has taken on the absurdities of energy management in the industry and continues to produce technically advanced and conceptually strong works. With The Solar Share, a microalgae culture produces edible biomass every day →
Loops of the loom is a series of artworks woven with electrical wires by Cecile Babiole. The symbolic aesthetics of the cables and their functionality are used both through their processual interweaving and through the audio signals transmitted through them. →
The mysteries of quantum physics and quantum computing have not yet permeated our society because they still remain a black box for the promised revolution in computation. Against this backdrop, Mike Rijnierse constructs a double-sided mirror in Quantum Mirror with →
Created for the Szczecin Philharmonic as part of the MUSIC.DESIGN.FORM Festival, this installation work from the panGenerator collective addresses noise pollution in a different context, offering the public a rather violent sensory experience. Noise sampled from the city’s soundscape is orchestrated →
Ben Grosser has developed a personal narrative to turn the psychological traps of social media upside down, using a universal visual language that targets its core mechanisms. In Stuck in the Scroll, he does this again, revealing in real time →
Delay was integrated as a symbolic element in early net art and is now still very much present, an unnoticed element in streaming. The process of unveiling, with the physicality of the global internet, has already been undertaken by various →
