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.
In our rekindled need to connect with nature, there are artists who show us how to do this literally, and Andreas Tegnander is certainly one of them. His sound installation Flora Ex Machina allows us to experience Beatrixpark in Amsterdam →
Oversized masses of indestructible plastic have become a symbol of both human overproduction and our endangered future. Song from Plastic by the duo UJOO+LIMHEEYOUNG is an installation with a device that can record and play back sounds, using the same →
When and how was art born? This probably unanswerable question has been asked countless times. In the Nelo Akamatsu and Yuichi Oba work ‘Perhaps, art begins with the fireflies’ this question becomes the instrument for elaborating the artist’s poetics. In →
The statistical “intelligence” of AI is also its own greatest weakness. Despite the hype, the bias and predictive scheme of neural networks prevent truly original associations. Diego Trujillo Pisanty reverses this logic by developing a device to generate images from →
The strength of the database queries lies in their ability to uncover hidden relationships. Max Colson does this in his Offshore Capital, focusing on London properties owned by offshore companies. He acquires 3D laser scans via LIDAR, to achieve realistic →
In A Monocular Dialogue, the artist Louis-Philippe Demers stages the inner musings of a croaking robotic monocle guided by an Ai, who expresses his thoughts as he observes with his single uncanny eye the people who gradually sit in front →
Nandita Kumar’s From Paradigm to Paradigm, into the Biomic Time is a layered work. Developed with a team of collaborators during the DAAD residency in Berlin, it consists of a bespoke machine resembling a newspaper press that prints deconstructed political →
The idea of turning Facebook into a collectively owned medium is not entirely new (It was explicitly mentioned recently in the book Own This!), but it has definitely entered the public imagination and has been carefully developed by artist Jonas →
The Carousel by Peter William Holden is an analogue work that uses a matrix of eight Kodak Carousel S slide film projectors arranged in a vertical grid of two x four. Each of these does not project film, as the →
One of the privileges of media artists is to create new systems that combine unexpected elements to produce unexpected results. André Rangel’s (Des)Aceleração fits perfectly into this category. He experiments with riboflavin (the yellow vitamin B2) and its property of →
