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.
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29.04.03 Boston Cyberarts 2003.
On April 26 opened the 2003 edition of the Boston Cyberarts Festival, an awesome exhibition with a lot of events covering the whole city, involving private and public cultural institutions, universities and entertainment companies. Even if it often mixes technology and theory, putting side by side those who simply apply computer techniques to ‘classical’ artifacts and those whose works are mainly digital, this exhibition still manages to capture the interest of the city for a couple of weeks. Among the features are: the presentation of the Toy Symphony project by Tod Machover from MIT and a 24 hours of computer art videos in the MIT List Visual Arts Center, the presentation of Terpsichore’s Haunt, a new work by the Scientific Computing and Visualization group and ‘Luminous Garden’, an installation by Beth Galston where light is diffused by embedding LEDs into organic materials. There will also be several digital figurative works, such as ‘TechArt’, at the Bancroft Gallery, or ‘The New Renaissance’, or the web art ‘Madam I’m Adam’, a set of installations by Isabella Stewart which are documented and removed shortly after, ‘Art is @ everywhere’, hosted on Boston Art Institute’s site and A2DD2A (Analog to Digital Digital to Analog), exhibited at the Fort Point Arts Community Gallery. The list of artists participating to the project is quite long: Lia, Martin Wattenberg, Stanza, Joseph Smolinski, Anna Shapiro, Dextro and many others. Finally, there’s a section dedicated to ‘public art’, with many exhibits: ‘Pedestrian’, an installation composed of street microprojections, next to the @ MIT hotel, ‘Word On the Site’, where sayings and proverbs are displayed with LEDs at the South Station, and ‘Wounds’, by Bruce Hanson, which projects images of wounds on the pedestrians’ bodies.
