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.
SD Card – RecursosRenovables
We open a strange package, made with scraps of comic books and wrapped in a yellow plastic tape. It’s the tape commonly used for building construction or in case of car accident, and all over it we find repeated the word PRECAUTION. Inside we find an SD Card. The card, as well as the inside part of the comics, is somehow altered, with black tape overlaps and other stickers printed on a yellow background. We feel a little bit worried, but in the end we download the SD Card contents on our computer and finally the first file we open is the leeme_Readme. It is soon clear that this edition belongs to some underground sub-culture. After seeing some slogans such as “muerte al PRI!” (death to PRI), “muerte al neoliberal!” (death to neoliberals) and “muerte al capital!” (death to capital) in evidence, we realize we have found a special and cryptic production. The release comes from Mexico City and was made by the artists Luis Alonso Sánchez, author of the packaging intervention, who could also be defined a post-graffitist, and Moisés Horta aka Hexorcismos project creator and author of the contents. Their Hexorcismos Desesperanza, released by the label RecursosRenovables is an unusual activist art product. The musical compositions in the original package are only two, “Represión” and “Ecocidio”. The first track is characterized by an experimental and rough electronics and filled with field recordings of many voices. Overall, the appeal is very rhythmic, rough and synthetic. The second track is more street-style, hymn-like and anti-capitalist than the former one, produced in simul-bass and with VRTX vocals. Despite having the same artwork, every copy is different and the edition in total is limited to only 25 pieces. This is an authorial techno-anarchism which re-mixes the topics of contemporary art and music. The exorcism has to be enjoyable in all the versions to be considered successful. So, there is another folder, Empaque, where we find all the artwork images of all the other copies. In another folder, #RenunciaEPN, there are the audio files of the square demonstrations in 2016. We can find videos and images of the fights and riots against the police. It’s a proof of the class conflict in Mexico in 2016. This conflict had some peaks and some reasons, if we think to the bloody fights, whose protagonists were teachers.
