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.
Entangled Others, aka Sofia Crespo e Feileacan si concentrano sulle relazioni tra forme di vita non umane, infrastrutture tecnologiche e processi computazionali. La loro (di)atomic garden prende ispirazione da alcuni esperimenti eseguiti dopo la seconda guerra mondiale, gli “atomic gardens”, →
What sounds might we associate with climate change without supporting visuals? Sound artists have explored the territories of glaciers melting and the cries and calls of endangered species. Johannes Kreidler takes a different approach in his “Jet Whistles / The →
Il Transit 5B-5 è attualmente uno dei più vecchi satelliti in orbita intorno alla Terra. Pur essendo ufficialmente fuori servizio, questo relitto spaziale continua a orbitare emettendo talvolta dei segnali segnali, in una sorta di imprevedibile limbo, come molti altri →
Hito Steyerl’s latest work, Mechanical Kurds, is the most recent embodiment of her extensive research on (digital) images and power. It is a single-channel video with architectural elements that simulate the software ‘framing’ of matched elements by computer vision, juxtaposed →
Young people moving across the EU for work account for 14.1% of the total, and some countries have progressively reconsidered their policies, if only subtly, to address irrational fears of losing national identity. This is the conceptual territory of Deutsch →
Stephanie Rentschler employs speculative design and interdisciplinary research to connect the social, ecological, and technological. Her outstanding SlimeMoldCrypt exemplifies this approach. It uses Physarum polycephalum, a slime mould capable of modifying its network of tendrils in response to stimuli, creating →
Arvida Byström (author of Inflated Fiction) is a model and artist who uses her physical and digital body as artistic territory. In Biblically Accurate Babe, she utilises an AI-powered website to artificially undress her own body, discovering how realistic the →
Zimoun (interviewed in Neural #35) is an established artist who has inflected his very personal interpretation of kinetic art using large numbers of small moving parts, mostly driven by motors, in a series of artworks. In 14 prepared dc-motors, 24 →
A muon is an elementary particle, similar to the electron, created by cosmic rays penetrating the Earth’s atmosphere and reaching the land surface. The Muonophone is a machine built by Lomond Campbell around a muon detector that generates notes based →
In recent years, the role of XR technologies has been consolidated as a virtual space where alternative realities can be experienced and, at times, shared. XR in art has taken on a specific character: it is a place where what →
