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.
By abstracting AI prediction models that analyse past textual and visual productions to develop possible new or ‘future’ content, we can also elaborate a different past based on a more distant past. Miloš Trakilović develops this concept in 564 Tracks →
Viral Infection is an installation by Johannes Kiel. It uses machine nests to produce the PLA bioplastic they are made of and also calculates their production needs, while a ‘virus machine’ attempts to infect further hosts in order to multiply. →
Marine biophony, which are sounds produced by living organisms in the sea (as opposed to antropophony which are sounds produced by humans), is attracting more attention, possibly due to improved technologies to investigate its impressive richness. Stijn Demeulenaere, has recorded →
Part automated system, part moving image, Nathalie Gebert’s Anthofluid is a sculptural device that generates an ephemeral pictorial proposition at regular intervals. Using medical tubing, the assembly of transparent wafers that form its surface is gradually filled with a purplish →
The popularity of meditation and mindfulness apps doesn’t seem to be related to a new era of Aquarius or a sudden deep awareness of our bodies, but instead a cry for help to survive the overload of tasks and information. →
One of the essential qualities of Andreas Zingerle and Linda Kronman’s artworks is to unpack systems that we take for granted, unveiling their unsettling mechanisms. And they don’t just describe these mechanisms, but often embody them. This is the case →
Considered to be among the very first computational generative visual processes, cellular automata has historically represented a pioneering form of endless computer graphics featuring machine logic. As a long time artist engaging with the aesthetic of the ‘imaginaries of the →
By surfing online or using digital entertainment services, we subject ourselves to a dense set of algorithms that propose content to us. Whether it’s the order in which we view the results of a search engine, the movies that are →
If social media had never existed, we don’t know if and when we would have had such a fragile media landscape where our judgement is essential to discern truth from falsehood. Mrinalini Singha & Haoheng Tang have developed a hybrid →
Sound walks have become a consolidated theory and artistic practice over time, with various acoustic devices enhancing or revealing participants’ listening abilities. In Embedded/Embodied, Farzaneh Nouri & Arash Akbari add a computational layer by training an artificial intelligence (AI) to →
