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.
Larger than Life is the title of this year's European Media Art Festival in Osnabrück in Germany. In growing to the previous events in 2001 and 2002 , this time the event is divided into the usual full-bodied interactive art exhibition with works mostly unpublished including 'Shared Moments' by Peter Bogers, with the camera looking people in their everyday situations , 'Scenes du Boulevard' by Denis Connolly and Anne Cleary in 24 short films that overlap a kind of social study, 'The Oral Thing' by Björn Melhus, the vulgarity of the television medium and its mechanisms used anymore, 'Dis-place' of Christian Ziegler, an interactive video on the split between visual memory and present a mirror image, 'Obscenity of the Surface' of Spaniard Daniel Canogar, in which the parts of the face are crowded into a panorama organic 'Optimizer Customer' by Jan van Nuenen, cyborg composed of mechanical and physical properties, and 'That – Cela – Dat' by Michael Snow, in which the display are used to their presence and graphic narrative. The Electronic lounge, award-winning works of art web Samurai.Remix By Kasselpunk, Test Pattern, Caution , Stadt Sound Station, A is for Apple and Odyssey, while among the cd rom were chosen Elevation, Polizon, the Italian colors Abbado, Das Tier and ShockedInternet. And so in five days of activities, including installations on the ceiling of a local bank, the courses of European universities presented in a special section and veejay nights, the German event also includes lectures by Lynn Hershman and Lev Manovich, in addition to a conference on developments in the biosciences with Eduardo Kac, Joe Davis, Prof. Birgit Richard, SymbioticA and Bioteknica.
