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.
The MIT Press, ISBN 026208321
How much is the flow of information incorporeal and detached from our relation with organic reality? How much is digital image, with its multidimensional possibility of distorsion and simulation, detached from →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262050730
Finding the data structure which describes a person through his public actions is the holy grail not only of marketing professionals, but also of police states and, more generally, any paranoid →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262134365
One of the cornerstones of hypertextual literature are text ‘adventures’, which lured in front of the monitor many users of the first personal computers. The value of computer programs as tools →
Harvard University Press, ISBN 0674008898
Even if these years there’s a sort of mythology of analog instruments, which are seen as a passage towards the radical digital transformations, one can say that the historical period when →
Tate Publishing, ISBN 1-85437-345-5 For several years, the net art has been a phenomenon fully enjoyed only by a small circle of initiates, most of which were themselves part or share in his creation and →
Artimo, ISBN 90-75380-46-1 Among the various silent and pervasive changes in the perception of the world that has brought Ebay, there is no doubt that induced aesthetics of photographic goods there in the auction. The →
Arkzin Communications, ISBN 953-6542-83-8
Networks redefine urban and social borders and can be interpreted in many ways according to the chosen perspective, a limited territory or the entire globe, revealing at the same time the potential →
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Crown Business, ISBN 0-609-61093-7
Certainly, Napster is one of the most important phenomena ever expressed by the Net, not only for the earthquake which caused in the ultra-conservative musical industry, but especially for allowing a →
Autonomedia, ISBN 1-57027-139-9
‘Behind the Blip’ addresses the need of a critical and pragmatic analysis of that complex and fleeting entity called ‘software’. The constant presence of interpretative interfaces for any kind of communications between people →
Mit Press, ISBN 0-262-24045-9
‘To know the rules of play’ becomes a recursive phrase if it’s applied to the act of designing games. On the other hand, games, in their electronic versions, have become more and →
