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 the work “Entropophone | La qualité de l’air” by artist Filipe Vilas-Boas, the anonymous video stream of a surveillance camera is transformed into a musical score: Each car detected triggers a sound as if it were the hole in →
Whispering by Ali Miharbi is a series of sound art installations. These are made of pneumatically activated 3D-printed acoustic resonators, most of which are modelled on the human vocal tract. The flow of air through the different versions produces human →
In the past, indigenous communities’ knowledge was dismissed or removed by colonisers, if not outright destroyed, an action regretted centuries later when their cultural wealth was understood through their scattered remains. The Lights Which Can Be Heard by Sébastien Robert →
The spectacular complexity and context of natural processes can’t be reduced to a short video on social media. Yet we tend to think it can be, because this short and cinematic form is captivating. From a very different perspective, Leonel →
We are being given more and more new tools to automatically manipulate images, increasingly altering the realistic elements perceived by our brains. This fascination with altering reality seems to have an irresistible attraction, but also raises many questions about its →
Anti-conventional approaches to computing data can transform the characterisation of a database from normative to dialectical. And the more economic value there is, the better. In Illusion of the City – Taipei, Chen Hsiangfu collected new flat floor plans of →
Fungi, viruses and bacteria manage to survive in conditions that are extreme for us, feeding on sometimes unthinkable substances. Amorphotheca resinae, for example, thanks to its ability to grow on a variety of inhospitable substrates, finds fuel tanks a favourable →
What digital life forms are still hiding in the folds of virtual worlds, living an unseen life that is still animated by code? And what do they represent from a sociological perspective in our digital anthropomorphic ecosystem? These are questions →
Many artists have begun to reflect a growing empathy towards plants, possibly the result of a new connection with nature triggered by the climate crisis. “La plante” by Baron Lanteigne is a virtual representation of a plant using a custom-made →
Artists working with virtual reality have often called to question the user’s perception of their work, challenging the industrial paradigm of immersive virtual space. Alexander Schubert‘s Sleep Laboratory is designed for a group of ten people to lie in a →
