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.
NAI Publishers, 2010, 276 pages, English, ISBN 978-90-5662-770-6
The aesthetics of networks and the web, approached from the most acknowledged definition of aesthetics, is an underdeveloped field despite more than a →
Eternal Summer Storm is the first experiment proposed by Choy Ka Fai within the framework of the Prospectus for a Future Body: an ambitious project whose goal, according to the →
The Belgian artist Jasper Rigole has dedicated his research to the concepts of authenticity, objectivity, falsification, and the special role that they play in relation to the processes of historization and, more generally, to →
Polity Press
, 2009
, 332 pages
, English,
ISBN-13: 978-0745640914
Finally available in English after eight years, “Optical Media” is an influential book by one of the major and more controversial media philosophers: Friedrich Kittler. →
Niklas Roy plays with the concept of privacy in his recent interactive installation My Little Piece of Privacy . To defend his laboratory in Berlin from prying eyes he has in fact →
O’Reilly Media,
2009
, Pages: 240,
ISBN: 978-0-596-80215-8
One of the most speculated upon threats in the digital domain (though completely obscure for the majority of people) is so-called “cyber warfare.” Its obscurity →
Check the Pasajes. Viajes por el híper-espacio photo set here
Moving through the imposing Greek columns made of neon that are reminiscent of typical ancient ones, immediately evokes the feeling that →
lightrhythm visuals
, dvd,
2010
The now expansive VJ scene has historically included quite a few talented designers fond of club music, coupling it with their visual skills. In the 2000s →
LabforCulture,
English,
2010,
96 pages,
ISBN-13: 978-1906496500
The two editors of this book define blogging as a “cultural seismograph” – a fascinating definition, looking at the regular activity of cultural blogging →
Routledge,
2009,
English, 160 pages,
ISBN-13: 978-0415547628
Focusing on the processual nature of computer art and purposely omitting all the strictly digital-related issues, this book tries diligently to define a philosophy of computer →
