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.
Onomatopee, ISBN 978-9493148864, English, 158 pages, 2022, The Netherlands
At Neural we still have a number of floppy discs, most of which surprisingly still work (the most important files were backed up a long →
One of the privileges of media artists is to create new systems that combine unexpected elements to produce unexpected results. André Rangel’s (Des)Aceleração fits perfectly into this category. He experiments with riboflavin (the yellow vitamin B2) and its property of →
Norient Books, ISBN 978-3952544426, English, 355 pages, 2022, Switzerland
The importance of sampling and the curation/selection of samples has been discussed at length, especially in cultural fields such as copyright studies and remix studies. Liechti, →
Holt/Smithson Foundation / The Warehouse Dallas, English, 108 pages, 2022, USA
Nancy Holt was an artist who experimented with a variety of media, and this catalogue focuses on her audio works. In particular, her →
Whispering by Ali Miharbi is a series of sound art installations. These are made of pneumatically activated 3D-printed acoustic resonators, most of which are modelled on the human vocal tract. The flow of air through the different versions produces human →
Torque Editions / Furtherfield / NeMe, ISBN 978-0993248764, English, 296 pages, 2022, UK
The printed format is becoming increasingly popular for enhancing, disseminating and archiving content related to art exhibitions and cultural initiatives, possibly →
In the past, indigenous communities’ knowledge was dismissed or removed by colonisers, if not outright destroyed, an action regretted centuries later when their cultural wealth was understood through their scattered remains. The Lights Which Can Be Heard by Sébastien Robert →
pIAR , ISBN 978-2958215408, English, 88 pages, 2022, Ghana
When an artist’s residency becomes a research project and the result goes beyond an installation, to a publication that provides historical and economic documentation, can →
The spectacular complexity and context of natural processes can’t be reduced to a short video on social media. Yet we tend to think it can be, because this short and cinematic form is captivating. From a very different perspective, Leonel →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262544818, English, 336 pages, 2022, USA
During the historic ReadMe Software Art Festival in Aarhus in 2004, there was a final performance night in a small club (Musikcafeen ) where it was →
