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.
. Art 
26.10.01 Art Futura 2001/Digital Jam.
Art Futura, the largest Spanish exhibition of electronic art continues to search within its favorite themes (3D, video games and computer graphics) at the CCCB (Centre de Cultura de Barcelona Compornea), although aiming attention to collective realizations. This year has been set up a section of net art, called Digital Jam , with eleven selected works by Roberta Bosco and Stefano Galdana, which have the common characteristic of being 'participatory', and cover with their artistic investigations a period of seven years. The work (all accessible from the links on the official site) are: 'IO-N.NET' Gregory Chatonsky (mini-projects and fragments of thoughts on physical and mental states in Flash format); 'No / e.html' of Arcángel Costantini (a webring playing with the semiotics of traffic on the network), 'The World's First Collaborative Sentence' by Douglas Davies (collective work which since 1994 has accumulated 200,000 texts, images and sounds by its users), 'Open Studio' of Andy Deck (a jam session graphic whose software is open source), 'Icontown' Bernd Holzhausen (in the image, a huge virtual city made of icons provided by users, evolving), 'ORANG, Open Radio Archive Network Group 'of Thomax Kaulmann (a vast sound archive searchable),' Glasbead 'by John Klima (software which generates breathtaking visuals and sound in 3D),' Cointel 'by Hannes Niepold, Hans Wastlhuber (a comic book collaborative non-linear),' Persistent Date Confidante 'Paul Vanouse (a database of' secrets' that can be updated or changed by users), 'WonderWalker' Marek Walczak, Martin Wattenberg (collection of websites as a social practice), and 'Sissyfight 2000' by Eric Zimmerman (competitive game between collegial).
