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.
Domestic altars have existed in various civilisations since ancient times. They are an expression of the need to represent a supernatural, friendly being with whom one can communicate in order to overcome the complexities and absurdities of life. ALTAR-3000 by →
Many women long for pregnancy half their adult lives and spend the other half remembering it with deep emotion. However, the material time of becoming pregnant is a moment full of conflicting emotions that are difficult to deal with both →
A simply delightful conversation with Bruce Sterling: 30 topics in 30 minutes (selected from the set of Neural topics). Made possible by Share Festival (thanks to both!)
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Mienophone by Zhe Wang and Daniel Heitz is an installation consisting of a hanging transparent glass sculpture equipped with a camera. When you look into the camera, a machine learning algorithm interprets and categorises the emotions shown by facial expressions. →
How do we acknowledge the presence of screens in the 21st century? There are so many everywhere that any rectangle, no matter how large, emitting a variety of lights and colours is instantly recognised as a screen. It is more →
Justine Emard‘s Supraorganism is an installation of robotic glass sculptures triggered by a machine learning process based on data from bees. The artist has created a system that abstracts the behaviour of bees and reacts to the presence of the →
Bees, butterflies, wasps, beetles and other pollinators essential for plant reproduction are the basis of our ecosystems. In the food production process, over 75% of the main agricultural crops depend on various levels of pollination performed by these animals. This →
/roʊˈdeɪoʊ/ Let’s Play: HOLLYWOOD by Cory Arcangel is a super computer that plays and learns to play in real time “Kim Kardashian: Hollywood”, an Android video game in which the goal is to gain more and more fans to become →
Inside Inside by Douglas Edric Stanley is an interactive installation for one player and multiple viewers. Two screens and a controller invite you to play Inside this famous Playdead video game. The story is set in a dystopian future where →
Tivon Rice uses a symbolic strategy to implement trustworthy machines by testing their limits. In his “models for environmental literacy” he brings trained AIs representing three perspectives – a scientist, a philosopher and an author – into a dialogue about →
