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.
Neural #56 extra is a foldable “Impossible Escapes” map developed by the Critical Media Lab at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures / Academy of Art and Design FHNW (only for subscribers to the printed magazine) attached in the magazine over an exclusive essay.
This map is part of the “Impossible Escapes – Evasive Strategies, Elusive Procedures, and Evacuation Plans.” presented at Transmediale 2017 festival.
From the Impossible Escapes webpage:
“Impossible Escapes is an escape and evasion map publication developed and distributed in collaboration with Neural magazine and transmedialefestival Berlin. The project addresses illusive tendencies to escape – be it from technology, society, or earth – and gathers various strategies of how to handle this most modern impetus of escaping.
Technoculture promises many ways out of our problematic modernity and we keep running away from ourselves in iteration. But it is more than doubtful, that escape is truly possible – or desirable. How can we nevertheless value the benefits of escape as a temporary gesture, movement or process? What might be forms of effective everyday micro-escapes? And what could be alternative notions and attitudes to confront our problems?
The map publication was exclusively distributed through special editions of Neural magazine’s issue 56 (which also features an essay about the project) as well as throughout the 2017 anniversary edition of transmediale festival “ever elusive” in Berlin. As part of the festival program, three parallel workshop sessions took place at different exits of Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the festival’s venue. The workshop was concluded by a field trip around the building, led by invited artist Leanne Wijnsma, who has made digging tunnels an essential part of her artistic practice.”
