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.
We’re only slowly learning how to deal with our extended memories and the physical traces they leave in the world. Both hardware and software keep track of our behaviour in order to serve us better, thus acting as a kind →
Using samples to “orchestrate” a melody has been attempted many different times in the past: from the YouTube remixes of voices/instruments to form a specific piece, to various games enabling the player to be an orchestra director, like the popular →
School books have never left room for doubt: the Middle Ages, sometimes still called the Dark Ages, was a period full of wars, famines, pestilences and a lack of cultural evolution. In recent years a large number of historians have →
World of Warcraft (or WoW) is currently the most actively played massively multiplayer online game with about 10 millions subscribers. The dynamics that govern it are similar to the canonical rules of the online role-playing games: players, after creating a →
It’s very hard to resist the invitation to write something on the lunar surface. Moon, the work that brings together the untameable Ai Wei Wei and Olafur Eliasson allows you to do exactly this. Connecting to the website Moon it →
In times of increasing online networked surveillance, the need for our disconnection and emancipation from centralized technological platforms becomes more and more crucial. One no longer feels safe when it comes to data. The news is out and the mere →
During the last edition of Transmediale festival in Berlin, the foyer of HKW was occupied by numerous theodolite scopes and data viewers, used to reveal to the audience different correlations of data. The graphs, charts and measurements presented and supported →
Including everything from psychoacoustics and sound topology to neural networks and philosophy of language, Florian Hecker has lately been setting up installations and performances internationally. Even though his work may appear as diligent, academic studies into various sonic materials Hecker →
Recent graduate of the Royal College of Art Minsu Kim has created an experimental project that explores the possibilities of sensory interaction between humans and machines. The work, which was completed in June 2013, investigates a mode of communication by →
What is there in common between our current obsession with data (as pertaining to the debates surrounding privacy and social media) and the fetishism for vinyl expressed in record collecting? The idea that an immaterial process can be stockpiled carries →
