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 accelerated microparticles being studied at the CERN institute in Geneva cannot be viewed with the naked eye. The difficulties faced by potential physics fans to understand the experiments have stimulated an artwork entitled “Sponge Ball Pneumatic Acceraltor”. Artist Niklas →
Cakes are definitive symbols of motherly care, but they can also evoke an old-fashioned notion of the housebound woman in a socially constrained role. “A Piece of the Pie Chart” by Annina Rüst (in the early 2000s part of the →
The extreme range of possible smartphones functions is fulfilling the imaginary about uncharted innovation in our daily tasks. Smartphones have replaced computers in this respect because of their innate mobile nature, opening up a completely new set of possibilities and →
In this era of abundant data, where everything – including our habits and misfortunes – constitutes material to be digitized, measured, and compared, infographics (methods for representing this data) are becoming increasingly important. One specialist in this field, data visualizer →
September 11, 1973. Palacio de la Moneda, Santiago. During the bloody coup backed by the United States and led by the country’s future dictator, General Pinochet, former president Salvador Allende took his own life with a single gunshot. This last →
Horror, especially zombie movies, is one of the genres most popular with independent filmmakers on a tight budget. In general consciousness, certain sonorities of electronic and experimental music have also become inextricably tied to the horror genre. It is interesting →
The feedback we get from a video, or any cinematic artifact is continuous, as every frame reaching our retina alters the state of our brain and our interpretation of the source material. In Simulacra by Karina Smigla-Bobinski, there is a →
The latest edition of the Olympic Winter Games held in Sochi will perhaps be better remembered for the international controversy surrounding the racial and homophobic (im)positions of the Russian Government than for the sporting events and the athletes involved. Reports of →
Already from its name, which recalls “Boundless Informant”, the software used by NSA for analyzing and visualizing data, Open Informant by Superflux manifests itself as a project that intends to investigate the subject of state surveillance. The work consists of →
Breathing new life back into obsolete and forgotten technology in media arts projects has seen a surge of increased activity in recent years. A kind of technological remix culture combined with a DIY hacking mentality has facilitated the resurrection of →
