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.
Shake Underground Editions, ISBN 8888865098 archeology of the imaginary electronic Kraftwerk surely occupy a very prominent: this is, of course, beyond the scoop itchy awakened from a biography of controversial and not very benevolent towards →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262232324
‘First person’ enjoyment binds traditional literature and the videogames where the player sees the world from a first person perspective. Anyway, there are fundamental differences between the two ‘genres’ →
CSDS, ISBN 8190142941
Every day, ‘official’ media shape the public opinion on the endless ‘normalization’ of wars and, with their continuous production of images of war and death, anaesthetize our consciences with fast →
Open University Press, ISBN 0335213154
‘Network society’, the society founded on the interconnected communication between its members, is one of the holy grails of digital activists, who have always believed that the unlimited possibility →
MIT Press, ISBN 0262232340 The feeling that something is 'alive' is closely linked to the autonomy of expression of the object in question. The simulations of 'life', that is the area of 'artificial life', has →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262072459
The contemporary rhetoric on ‘new media’ and their absolute novelty deserves a documented deconstruction to bring to the attention of contemporary culture the historical and cultural roots that immaterial →
Arizona State University, ISBN 0972429107
The possibility to ‘write’ informations in living beings is one of the characteristics of transgenic art, an art form which Eduardo Kac (see the interview on Neural n.20) →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262134241
The necessary contributions by female artists in the creation of media art hasn’t yet received the contexualization and place in history they deserve. The realization of artifacts which can →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 0816643539
Organic transformations hurt our sensitivity, since they represent the fear of the new body models, weak in their experimental constitution. This text collects a detailed and unique analysis →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262692864
The movie industry is one of the most conservative ones when it comes to new models of production and enjoyment. The historic ‘broadcast’ model, where few big companies handle →
