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.
Lauren Lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald bring a welcome human element to the domain of machine intelligence. In “Unlearning Language, the pair deliberately overturn the current paradigm imposed by technology industry. McCarthy and McDonald programme an AI that →
Artist David Bowen’s installation Plant Bot experiments with the time and ways of interdependence between a plant and a system consisting of a robotic arm, a video camera and a computer. The video camera, mounted on the robotic arm, observes →
The invisibility of plant biofeedback is similar to that of viruses, sounds and stored digital data, all of which are still very present and directly affect us. Desert Songs is a work by Love Hultén, a machine that converts the →
The buildings we inhabit have stolen space from countless other living beings. With urban arrogance and an abundance of artificial and invasive materials, we have literally invaded many ecosystems that were once ideal and autonomous. With rising sea levels, there →
As in previous media-centric conflicts, the various layers of propaganda expressed during the war in Ukraine have been echoed in the media, often in their most crudest or nightmarish forms. PropaGAN is a sophisticated machine created by Egor Kraft. It →
The representation of the disconnection between spaces in virtual reality has been a concern since its inception. In Reconnection, Chun Hua Catherine Dong demonstrates the separation and reconciliation between perceived space, physical space and their associated meanings. The elements of →
Dylan Sheridan‘s kinetic sound art consists of precarious DIY machines, unpredictable automatisms and noises that are welcome amidst other, mostly dissonant sounds. In Random Impulse, a microphone is thrown around by an air compressor with whipping trajectories. This may be →
The underground communications infrastructure of the internet is made up of cables and has been the most important material through which we understand how information flows since the telegraph. Mimi Ọnụọha‘s work uses technology to reveal social relationships and power →
The perceptual dimension of technological artworks has greatly improved in the last decade. For example, if the revamped virtual reality has the advantage of complete visual immersion and an escapist dimension, in a physical space it is certainly more difficult →
There is a whole history of dancing as a competitive game, from the early ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ to the popular ‘Just Dance’, where a machine is quantifying and then evaluating players’ moves. The physical involvement of the player and the →
