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.
Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9491677700, English, 176 pages, 2016, Netherlands
What is the real cultural and social value of female buttocks in our image-inflated contemporaneity? Something we take for granted as a sexual attraction and an allusion has more meanings and nuances in its pervasive use on mass and social media. The author’s thesis is that the butt is more contemporary than other sexual characteristics, and it has especially been pushed by online virality. Which is plausible if we think about the endless battle with the Facebook automatic filters for nudity, and how buttocks are usually more easily allowed, or about the ‘belfie’ (butt selfie) term, accepted in spoken and written language. And in the immense vastness of online erotic pictures, which the author underlines are continually shifting the line dividing ‘porn’ from ‘not porn’, we can find that a lot of controversial images with buttocks as the primary element are still considered ‘not’. With the first one written (printed) on the back part of worn female underwear, the book provides six visually rich chapters. The texts are altogether an intriguing excursion through society’s perception and toleration of being exposed to butts, and its strategic visual use and significance. The iconography is made of extracts from celebrities’ Instagram accounts, screenshots from hip-hop and pop videos, as well as from classic movies and implant surgery. All the pictures are printed in black and white, flattening the respective programmed aesthetics and accentuating the recurring similarities, illustrating the study in a careful and consistent way.
