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.
Delegating to machines is an escalating practice in Western social systems. Along this line new apps and autonomous systems, acting on our behalf, are progressively meant to control or manage non-trivial aspects of our lives, including the totemic Alexa, Siri, →
The symbolic value of a 3D printer has lowered from a machine that would have ‘fixed’ our daily reality on multiple levels, to one of the many tools to produce something valuable. This technology has suffered the same evolution crisis →
One of the most powerful stories about incommunicability is undeniably the Tower of Babel. Used as a metaphor, as it was meant to, countless times, it has become synonymous with becoming linguistic strangers to each other. Although this is correct →
A relief is a sculpture which extends from a two dimensional plain into three dimensional space. The installation “Relief” by Mike Rijnierse approaches this form from a sonic perspective, employing echolocation to turn the perception of a surface into the →
Analogue media devices are rising again, with a re-evaluation of their technical and aesthetic specificities. With this process comes the improved knowledge of these devices’ history, which sometimes defines the social role they had in the content production. “Projektor” by →
The poetic dimension of the sky has been reconsidered since humans started to launch artificial satellites into orbit. These objects are at the verge from between being visible or invisible, and that’s where the artists collective Quadrature (Juliane Götz and →
The visualisation of wi-fi networks has been a relatively popular topic among media artists. From the induced wounds of “Constraint City” by Gordan Savicic, to the generated light in “Immaterials” by Timo Arnall, the objective has been to render visible →
Walking in a forest, we find a multitude of organic forms entangled with each other at different stages of life. The decay of one is a feast for another, in a continuous cycle of growth and decay. “(Un) Measurements 2# →
“Why did I leave social media?” French artist Thierry Fournier presents a 32 minute video series of people who have spontaneously decided to abandon or disable their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat as they are too harmful and evil →
Julian Oliver, one of the main writers of the ‘Critical Engineering’ manifesto, has never given up on producing artworks with a concrete side, both universally applicable and opening a space of awareness and sense of contradiction in the public. “Harvest” →
