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.
servus.at, ISBN-13: 978-3950420005, English, 160 pages, 2015, Austria
The current trajectories of digital data are appropriately summarized in the editors’ introduction: we have simply “lost control” of our digital data. Nevertheless this book is anything but unruly, and articulated in →
Geert-Jan Hobijn, founder of the mythical Staalplaat label, has conceived and produced socially relevant sound artworks in the last decade. Starting with the concern acknowledged by transnational authorities about the amount of plastic spread in seas, a problem that is →
Fracking is already famous as one of the most environmentally devastating practices used to extract hydrocarbons from the soil. It injects large volumes of high-pressure water into the ground in order to break rocks and facilitate the flow of shale →
Fitness data has become one of the most popularly produced “big data” about us as quantified selves. The tricky mechanism, successfully enabled by fitness-related technologies, aims to grant instant rewards through slick interfaces and precise quantifications, inherently subverting the fact →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822357305, English, 352 pages, 2015, USA
The unstoppable explosion of recorded data makes it increasingly difficult to reduce its complexity to an understandable and meaningful representation. The scale we are confronted with is unknown. This →
IdPure éditions, ISBN-13: 978-970099215, English, 208 pages, 2015, Switzerland
Algorithmic culture, or the culture expressed by automated and particularly software-based systems, has started to garner attention only recently, when its social, cultural and economical consequences have started to become clearly →
Paolo Cirio has researched different social systems in his artistic activity, always finding tactical methods to conceptually destabilize these through the use of contextualized and strategic technologies. In Obscurity (after Overexposed) he once more addresses a facial recognition system, but →
The contemporary yin and yang of privacy and surveillance is full of conceptual grey areas, especially in relation to surveillance and the degree of agency or passivity a user can assume. Uneasiness (about being observed or observing something illegal) is →
Greyscale Press, ISBN-13: 978-2940561001, English, 140 pages, 2015, France
Greyscale Press’ Manuel Schmalstieg understands publishing after the Internet. Not only because its catalogue of books is full of critical texts originally available only online, but mainly because it applies skilled →
Disputes about global warming between different groups often come down to competing interpretations of data – to building evidence or dismissing it. Intellectual dispute sometimes hides that these are vital questions with very physical implications. Time and Tide Bell →
