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 
27.05.02 Generator, net art generative.
It is going on at the SpaceX gallery of Exeter (England), Generator , an exhibition of electronic art generative work that connects with particular graphic, literary and musical with the theories of chaos and complexity, and with the techniques of neural networks and life artificial intelligence that are the basis of automatic generation. In addition to an interesting offline part is the part of the work on the network that makes most experienced directly the weight of the subject and distance. The list of artists is long and includes Stuart Brisley and Ade Ward with 'Ordure :: real-time' a large projection of a digital image that gradually loses its data, which has become a sort of scrap digital pixel by pixel, Jeff Instone + Joanna Walsh 'Oulibot', a work inspired by OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), a group of mathematicians and experimental writers who have developed ques'agente that research and re-contextualizes texts from the web, Alex McLean and his' forkbomb. pl ', presented at the last Transmediale, the elusive Netochka Nezvanova with' genograph (a proposal) ', a project full of fascinating ideas, Colin Sackett and Jo Walsh' extendedssayes', an essay written in collective lines of progressive length , Cornelia Sollfrank with 'net.art generator + female extension', a series of works autocomponenti and a collection of links on the topic, with STAR 'vivaria', a collection of works of artificial life and generative systems, Ade Ward with his famous 'Auto-Illustrator' and finally Zoë Irvine with 'Magnetic Migration Music' with a collection of tape recordings 'found in the streets and sent to the author'. Complexity, case, artificial life forms and organic information, all of these themes emerge from the work, that emphasize all the equipment manufacturing process, making the title of the event ('generator') refers to the person, to the system and the results it generates.
