Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
Open Humanities Pres, book, ISBN 978-1785421433, English, 416 pages, 2025, UK
History requires context to connect facts and events, and art history equally needs context to understand art movements, artists, and artworks. This is one of the core values of the Entangled Traditions research project, which Gabriel Menotti led for over five years, reconstructing and contextualising the mapping of the history of New Media and Computer Arts in postwar Brazil. This comprehensive anthology, edited together with German Alfonso Nunez, is structured into four thematic sections: code and language, social communication systems, moving images, and personal computers. The first section is driven by the Concretism movement, which was already being acknowledged abroad while the country was under a military dictatorship. Key texts by authors such as Augusto de Campos, Waldemar Cordeiro, and Walter Zanini are included from the 1950s to the 1970s. The second section discusses artists working with uncensored communication and networks during totalitarian times, enabling a “systemic awareness”, with texts by Eduardo Kac, Frederico Morais, and others. The third section focuses on analogue audiovisual productions as a moment of renaissance after the return of democracy, with contributions by Lucas Bambozzi, Solange Farkas, and others. The fourth and final section comprehensively reconstructs the impact of the personal computer on Brazilian media art in a new social and political context, with texts by Arlindo Machado, Christine Mello, and others . The editors argue that art and technology have been used in Brazil as a decolonisation strategy, and this book maintains the fragmentation of Brazilian media art as a consistent approach. Most of the texts have been translated into English for the first time, which makes this work, if possible, even more valuable.
