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.
Self-destructive artworks have created a radical turning point in the consideration of media decay and art by questioning the integrity of the artwork and its memory. In Horologic Solum, Vivian Xu and Benjamin Bacon have built a machine that slowly →
Doors of Listening is a situated work developed by Félix Blume in the Klankenbos forest in Belgium, which also houses an entire open-air sound art museum. It consists of a series of doors donated by some villagers, and if you →
In 1997, pioneer net.artist Olia Lialina made “Agatha Appears”, where two protagonists discuss internet teleportation, whose dialogues, exploiting html, can be read only with a mouseover. At some point she says “but I’ll come here again”. Clicking on her we →
Daniel Iregui ‘s “Antibodies” is an artwork built around the mediation of most social relations during the pandemic: the video call. It is a public space installation that can also be experienced through a web interface. It uses motion sensors →
Spotify users know the feeling of being understood by a system whose proprietary algorithm analyses and produces the perfect, tailored consumption machine. It dissects the basic elements of its 70 million track database to qualify and quantify each track, down →
The concept of the loop is seminal in computer programming, and probably one of the most emblematic to the history of industrial automation. In “Perpétuité I,” Felix Luque Sanchez built a mechatronic system in a loop in which one machine →
We are in 2048. Timo is a small artificially intelligent agent and the main character of Unexpected Scenery, a critical game by artist JooYoung Oh. The aim of the game is to help Timo get as much data as possible →
There’s a paradox in our technically advanced environment: although sophisticated sensors and techniques have been developed to appeal to almost all of our senses, they almost exclusively target our visual senses. Even the new wave of VR content and experiments →
We have yet to fully understand the dimension and cultural implications of the post-industrial deterioration, with media archaeology on one side reconstructing processes and trajectories, and chemistry on the other to save us from the consequence of that decline. “High →
Organscape by Xoan Xil is an installation formed by “Organismo I”, an ensemble of delicate kinetic machines designed to emulate the repertoire of natural world sounds, with four short corresponding pieces for organ (Organscape I – IV), obtained from the →
