Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190460167, English, 880 pages, 2019, UK
Five years in the making, this heavy tome is the first of two volumes investigating sound and imagination from a true multidisciplinary perspective (from psychoacoustics to →
Il cordyceps è un fungo parassita che si innesta negli insetti nutrendosene. Project Alias, di Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, è un simile “parassita” per gli home device, che può essere personalizzato per controllare i propri smart assistant tutelando la →
CD – Raster
Non c’è futuro senza lacrime e qui il nucleo centrale del progetto è parte appunto della nostra contemporaneità estrema, un concentrato di elaborazioni sensoriali in forma di ibridi umano-macchinici. Uwe Schmidt sotto il moniker Atom™ non è →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517905965, English, 240 pages, 2019, USA
What happens when one of the most respected philosophers of the media art scene writes an entire book exploring the work of three artists? Brian →
The golden era of electronic art produced not only primordial generative artworks, screen manipulations and electronic music, but also a few custom-hardware-based sculptures, of which only a small number have been preserved. Eirik Brandal has an interest in such artefacts, →
CD – Wandelweiser
La parola inglese “tracery”, “flechtwerk” in tedesco, in italiano potrebbe essere tradotta in molte differenti maniere, innanzitutto “intreccio” che ben s’adatta all’idea di una musica elettronica molto manipolata, ma anche “ricamo”, o “intaglio”, o “disegno”, che testimonierebbero →
Christoph Merian Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3856169312, English, 192 pages, 2020, Switzerland
Technology’s influence on our emotions is a recurring topic in digital culture discourse, especially since we entered the era of the quantified self. In particular, facial recognition →
There is growing criticism of the widespread application of machine-based recognition and data processing, especially those involving visual technologies. The inaccuracy, tolerated as a minority, is second only to the political consequences of the applied criteria. Francis Hunger & Flupke →
CD – Noton
Quarta e penultima uscita per Alva Noto della serie Xerrox, partita nel 2007, un progetto che nell’insieme è basato sul concetto di replica digitale del materiale di partenza, sulla manipolazione dei dati, utilizzando un metodo di →
In Michael Sedbon’s “CMD”, two artificial ecosystems, made by sets of photosynthetic bacteria, share a light source, the access to which is granted through a ‘market’. A genetic algorithm optimises the market rules. Each bacterial colony can claim access to →
Hirmer Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-3777432045, German, 192 pages, 2019, Germany
Cao Fei is probably one of the most requested Chinese artists by US and EU art institutions. This can largely be attributed to a rare ability to translate →
Al centro dell’installazione “*(asterisk)” c’è quel che sembra una mela. Incastrata dentro una sfera armillare, la mela ruota di continuo a 360°, inquadrata da telecamere che scansionano al millimetro la sua superficie. Quattro monitor posizionati intorno all’ingranaggio mostrano in tempo →
Blank Forms Editions, ISSN: 2642-7052, English, 302 pages, 2019, USA
The 4th issue of Blank Forms’ journal serves its vocation to research and publish forgotten dynamics and connections in experimental music. The issue’s title is borrowed →
Nathalie Gebert’s “On Framing Textile Ambiguities” is an excellent work using textile as both medium and metaphor, and focusing on thread, for its “emancipatory potential”. It inevitably mentions the famous Jacquard loom, as an ancestor of computing systems, and associated →
