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.
Measuring phenomena, making them readable in the form of numbers, producing data, creating models to guide future choices, is a feverish process around us. We let ourselves be guided by devices programmed by others to make choices, modulate behaviors, take →
If we compare different representations of the Universe in different cultures at different moments in time, we confront very elaborated and imaginative systems, all trying to cope with an unknown structural dimension and scale. Nicolas Montgermont’s “Axis Mvndi“, cosmic radio →
Learning from the digitised past and present, and then acting, somehow, in response. This seems to be the mantra of the current AI compulsion, crossing industrial and now cultural fields. In art it translates into ‘reading’ big chunks of art →
Can the sometimes catastrophic ‘unboxing’ of new technological products be considered ‘luddism’? Actually, it’s the opposite, as we can see in endless YouTube videos. Still the accidental destruction of an expensive smartphone generates chilling reactions in the audience, who are →
In dystopian times, with multiple perspectives of future catastrophes being announced every now and then, a question often arises: on what OS will we run our devices in the post-apocalypse? “Collapse OS” by Virgil Dupras seems to →
Although the Swiss landscapes are known throughout the world for their uncontaminated beauty, in reality they are supported by artificial infrastructures that have shaped these natural environments for decades: dams, tunnels, protection nets, irrigation systems, snow cannons and many other →
Similar to what Philip Dick told us in 1956, in Minority Report, our ‘smart cities’ are now trying to become “safe cities”. There are a lot of IT companies already working with the various military forces, creating mapping systems that →
The spectacle of science and technology is sometimes used by artists to divert and use an audience’s attention. This is the case with ’VOLTA’ by Yann Leguay, which exploits the ‘plasma speaker’ technique (a variation of Tesla coil speakers), using →
Le teorie sulla nascita delle specie viventi sono molteplici e forse anche vere, o vere solo in parte. Nonostante le discrepanze, le incertezze e gli ovvi sviluppi, la convinzione di partenza è un concetto semplice, quasi banale, sicuramente evocativo: la →
The introduction of custom machines into performance art has been well-established since the early 20th century, an extension of communication that anticipated cybernetic extensions of the body. During the 1990s, in particular, performative groups labeled as ‘cyberpunk’ like La Fura →
