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 
04:07:02 Pleix.net, abstraction, sarcasm and advertising in online video.
Pleix.net is a promising group of digital artists specialize in different areas, including graphic design and electronic music, which give vent to their excellent experiments on common site. Five great video, in fact, are accessible on this site in line with the aesthetic and communicative abilities of the group. Two of the movies ('No' and 'More') are made from Bleip, which manages to combine the techniques of vector abstract animation with composite electro soundtrack, assembling sequences tight and very well laid out. 'Simon', but it's the video that applies to a human being confined in a space archiettonico the concept of the old 'Simon', the game analog of the seventies which dictated a sequence sound / colored to remember and repeat. The claustrophobia of the Japanese girl obsessed by the alternating colors and sounds is narrated with an ever-increasing pace, until it dissolve in the same environment psycho-fiction. 'Beauty Kit' is instead a sarcastic series of commercials in which products of cosmetic surgery do-it-yourselfers are proposed for a female audience of childhood, also here the mounting impeccable and the alternation of the precise timing of advertisement television make it a small masterpiece. Ultimate realization of the collective Pleix.net is finally 'Itsu', clip eponymous song of the band electronic Plaid, under contract with Warp. The surreal story of an incredible industrial exploitation in breeding pigs generates unintended consequences on the misguided leadership group company, through a hilarious script and some very well done animations.
