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.
LAX will use body imaging scanning – Los Angeles Times
Scaring 3D body scanning device for airports.
(tags: hacktivism visual)
Live in the Living
A public concert in your spacious living room.
(tags: media music)
cd-rom
Strings of codes and images, recontextualizations integrated by GUI interfaces, a development paradigm aimed at allowing an interaction with a computer by means of graphically manipulating objects. Relations that, in the ‘prologue’, →
Shoot ’em up (or shmup for short) is a computer and video game genre where the player usually controls a vehicle or character and fights large numbers of enemies with shooting attacks, typically →
The World Is Daft
A fan-based collectively produced bootleg dvd of a Daft Punk live concert.
(tags: mashup video music media)
You don’t need to be a videogame fan or being a teenager in the seventies / eighties to know videogame classics like Space Invaders, Pacman or Tetris. Their iconic power is still →
Ten Thousand Cents
Thousands of individuals drawing a 1/10.000 of a 100 bucks dollar for its theoretical value: one cent via the Amazon Mechanical Turk
(tags: art media hacking visual)
Soundwagon Portable Record Player
The one used by Staalplaat Soundsystem.
(tags: music media sound)
The “Totemobile” by Brooklyn- based Mexican – American artist and roboticist, Chico Macmurtrie, is a kinetic transforming robot that morphs a Citroen DS automobile into a 20-meter tall “totem” with human-like features. Similar in →
CD – Creative Sources
“Fury (after Anger)” is a new project by Robert von Heumen made up of two recordings: the title track, split in four different tracks, and “They Would Get →
Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research (AWI) PALAOA – Livestream
Hydrophones sound streaming from below the Antarctic Ocean.
(tags: music science sound)
“I went back home, but I couldn’t keep calm. I went down the street and started running, fast, faster and faster [ … ] I felt as if I took all the blood →
CD – Kvitnu
The interweaving of concepts related to the four natural elements (air, water, earth, fire) has already generated contemporary art forms (the “arte povera” in Rome during the sixties, for example, →
YouTube – DJ Ramsey Scratch Tape Decks
Scratching tapes.
(tags: hacking music sound media)
