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.
CreativeApplications, ISSN: 2292-0919, English, 218 pages, 2016, Canada
This second issue of Holo magazine simply confirms the care and quality emerging from the first one, published in 2014. The publication’s design background is quite clearly emerging once more: there are different graphic solutions to enhance the index (preview) of different sections, whose sequence and internal structure is carefully calibrated. Furthermore a separated thicker folio is included, revealing to be a kit for assembling a “cryptoclock”, a paper random number generator, a tool coupling a dedicated part in the magazine about these topics. Content includes the usual range of interviews with a selection of renowned artists: Ryoichi Kurokawa, Vera Molnar, Jürg Lehni, Tale of Tales, Rafael Lozano Hemmer, Katie Paterson and Timo Arnall. Moreover there’s a whole section with a substantial series of articles, from historical to technical, exploring the “search for true randomness (and false certainty)”, or investigating the importance of random numbers (and randomness in general) in our contemporary world. A couple of articles follow, respectively about the development of art at Cern, and artworks structured around the Oculus Rift technology, ending with the usual “Stream” section of distinct events and news emerging during 2015. The magazine seems to fix its focus on investigating contemporary digital aesthetics, looking at science as an associated territory. Its irregular periodicity seems also to allow a consistent selection and proper development of each piece of content.
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