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 
22:03:02 intermedium 2, the radio as art on the net.
Inaugurated today at the ZKM in Karlsruhe (Germany) 'intermedium 2, X or 0: Identities in the 21st century' , the second edition of the biennial international festival of hybridization of the radio medium with other media, including, of course, the Internet. Involved more than one hundred artists from 15 nations and involved work with various kinds of sound, and more generally to 'broadcast narrative' that are issued in local frequencies and broadcast on the network. Among the net art projects, which make up a large part of the program are: Carlson Hatton, 'Aaron Davenport (from boom-box to detox)', the story of a young Californian suburban told through collage of sound fragments, Orhan Kipcak, 'AC – Audiocompounder ', fragments of identity collected from radio plays and reassembled for new narrative possibilities, Devolve Into II ( see ), Claudia Hardi '= 100 * kill first? @ Player ', a sequence for answering rethought and rewritten, Atau Tanaka' Frankensteins Netz '+' Promethee Numérique – Wiretapping the Beast ', a mysterious creature insatiable texts, images and sounds, which absorbs in a visible and audible, Manuel Räder , '(the) visible and the invisible', a soundtrack that interacts with the video which tells of places where they are stuck chewing gum, VOPOS ( see ) of the Italian 0100101110101101.ORG, Klaus Buhlert '"… the whole thing's … " (Part 3) ', an online interactive game based on texts by Samuel Beckett, and Mirjam Kort' Susi & Peter in Taka-Tuka-Land ', a symbiosis of cultures and narrative sound accordingly. There are also many projects that make use of the network as a transmission medium among which we should mention Sophisticated Soiree ( see ) spectacular event cardio-audio-visual with the software programmed by the Italian Jaromil.
