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.
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 →
The world has changed many times along with its inhabitants. Inhabitants who are a bit ungrateful, if we look at ourselves in the mirror. We have evolved, built, destroyed and … polluted, polluted a lot. We even polluted while cleaning: →
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 →
Red Lines is a considerable project by Evan Roth, assembled through multiple trips around the world, to places where the communication cables emerge from the sea. His pilgrimage has produced 53 individual network located videos, shot in 8 countries on →
In the art installation “Labor“, Paul Vanouse makes a system that re-creates the scent of people sweating in stressful conditions. The bacteria involved are placed in three glass bioreactors. These produce the primary scents, which are then merged in a →
The borders between stage, exhibition space and performative extended space have blurred in recent years, becoming increasingly liquid. The Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret has assembled an audiovisual performance that wholly proves this concept. In “HANNAH”, the whole space is conceived →
Cameras, recognition software, walls, borders … we are growing more and more accustomed to sacrificing humanity and privacy in the name of some sort of promised security, or even for much less. The ideological and practical boundaries between what is →
The sun has recently acquired a symbolic role as the frightening, inevitable, overheating agent in our challenging environmental future. Nicky Assmann’s “The Abysses of the Scorching Sun” is a kinetic installation with a light machine pointed towards the direction of →
Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak are not new in interweaving media and textiles, creating original works that mix them for activist purposed (The Knitted Radio). Their “The Embroidered Computer” uses historic gold embroidery materials and specific knowledge in craft to →
Jaime E Oliver’s “Caracoles iv” is a project that extends the scope and physical properties of an ancient Andean musical instrument: the pututus. It is a conch shell that used to be played by cutting the apex of its spire →
