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 French Symbolist and proto-science-fiction writer Alfred Jarry proposed the term Pataphysics in 1893 to describe a kind of pseudo-scientific enquiry combined with a surrealist penchant for absurdity resulting in a science of imaginary solutions. Jarry’s Pataphysical Universe contains ideas →
Telepathy Advertising presents itself as the first communication agency specialized in extra-sensory techniques, able to convey an advertising message directly into the prospective customer’s mind. Using knowledge of neuromarketing, its promotional campaigns aim to induce the same reactions and emotions →
Deep in the core of the Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader) terms and conditions there is one clear sentence concerning the ownership of digital content: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider”. This means that every →
The Marja Trio is a locative media sound art project developed by Kaffe Matthews, in association with the international art platform Hai Art, during a 10 day artist-in-residence on and around Hailuoto island in Finland. In this work, standard bikes →
The British scientist Alan Turing was a
mathematician, logician and cryptography expert, and was considered
one of the most important scholars and investigators in the field
of applied mathematics and the beginnings of computer science. He
first made a name →
Digital devices support portable literature at various levels, but this mostly involves bestsellers and popular literature, most of the time excluding poetry. The artwork Autonomous Parapoetic Device (APxD mkII) by Allison Parrish is a portable machine that generates poetry, and →
Kyle E Evans’ oscillographic synthesizer, the de/Rastra, consists of a circuit-bent CRT TV linked to a computer running a MAX/MSP patch to enable discreet cross-wiring of audio and video signals. The chassis of the TV has been modified to incorporate →
Anyone who has gone through New York in recent months may be unaware of Heather Dewey-Hagborg‘s Stranger Visions. This is a project that exacerbates the concept of surveillance, allowing it to creep into our most private and intimate sphere: our →
On 16 January 2013 a parcel was shipped from the borough of Hackney to the Ecuadorian Embassy, final recipient: Julian Assange. The package contained a phone which, through a hole in the box, photographed the surrounding environment every ten seconds, →
Paolo Cirio enjoys exploits. In many ways he is a virtuoso player of contemporary networks, investigating and exposing their inner workings, locating their vulnerabilities and subverting their functionality. In his latest project, Loophole 4 All , Cirio focused on an →
