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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04.07.03 Radical Software, the first electronic art magazine has been digitized.
Among the countless cultural stimuli that crossed the Sixties and the Seventies, there were many of them that tried to build visionary perspectives of media and of an art centered on them. The first printed magazine which tried to put together these themes and the printed medium was Radical Software, which, even if just for a few numbers (eleven, between 1970 and 1974), casted a new light on sceneries yet to be considered. The essays and the works reviewed in those pages investigated the first paradoxes that manifested themselves in the context of the rise of the not-yet-personal computer. All the issues have been digitized in PDF format and made available on a dedicated site, complete with search engine and database. This work was coordinated by Ira Schneider (who was among the founders of the magazine) and Davidson Gigliotti, who presented it at the Transmediale festival in 2002. A very important process which should be encouraged and repeated: the preservation of important historical documents about media art, often underestimated in the endless search for the ‘new’.
.art
04.07.03 Radical Software, the first electronic art magazine has been digitized.
Among the countless cultural stimuli that crossed the Sixties and the Seventies, there were many of them that tried to build visionary perspectives of media and of an art centered on them. The first printed magazine which tried to put together these themes and the printed medium was Radical Software, which, even if just for a few numbers (eleven, between 1970 and 1974), casted a new light on sceneries yet to be considered. The essays and the works reviewed in those pages investigated the first paradoxes that manifested themselves in the context of the rise of the not-yet-personal computer. All the issues have been digitized in PDF format and made available on a dedicated site, complete with search engine and database. This work was coordinated by Ira Schneider (who was among the founders of the magazine) and Davidson Gigliotti, who presented it at the Transmediale festival in 2002. A very important process which should be encouraged and repeated: the preservation of important historical documents about media art, often underestimated in the endless search for the ‘new’.
