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 contemporary yin and yang of privacy and surveillance is full of conceptual grey areas, especially in relation to surveillance and the degree of agency or passivity a user can assume. Uneasiness (about being observed or observing something illegal) is →
Disputes about global warming between different groups often come down to competing interpretations of data – to building evidence or dismissing it. Intellectual dispute sometimes hides that these are vital questions with very physical implications. Time and Tide Bell →
Look around on a typical day at an exhibition of modern and contemporary art and you’ll probably find curious students in search of inspiration; professionals (who always seems to be doing something important); invigilators counting down the hours; loving couples →
20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes is a performance by Darsha Hewitt, staged at the 2015 Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress. Hewitt builds twenty small electronic circuits with wires, chips, small components and nine-volt batteries in twenty minutes. The time →
Looking at western news and commentaries, Beijing often looks like the Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner, with an unbearably high level of pollution that has at times pushed authorities to forbid people from leaving their homes. The Chinese performance →
North, South, West, East. A meter, a foot, a mile, an inch, a pixel. Much of our composure often results from certainties, superstructures, units of measurement, from the knowledge of space and time. But at other times it’s necessary to →
The power of representing reality given by smartphone cameras in our pockets is formidable; even considering only the sheer quantity of pictures we’re carrying with us (usually no less than a few thousands) we can clearly see how it’s inevitably →
The loss of reference points in the open sea affects our equilibrium, both physically and psychologically. Seasickness is a kind of vertigo, triggered by the feeling of instability in both our body and the liquid environment we are in. Commissioned →
We live in a dark age. While this phrase emerges from the middle ages … any excuse is good. Culture? Dark age. Policy? Dark age. Humanitarian rights? Dark age. London, one of the most popular European capitals, wanted to start →
Deep Sweep is a low-cost aerospace probe that intercepts the transmission signals between Earth and the stratosphere, specialising in signals sent to satellites by drones and UAV. The project was conceived and designed by Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölen and Danja →
