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.
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816699544, English, 632 pages, 2016, USA
The scope of the digital is aptly represented in the scope of the definition of “digital humanities”. Initially acknowledged to be an umbrella term, it is gradually becoming more →
For humans, the conquest of space began in 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched the artificial satellite Sputnik. Since then, more than 4,000 satellites and 500 astronauts have gone into space. Despite the very important scientific discoveries achieved, space →
Technology has educated human beings to incorporate new gestures into their communication. These may initially be perceived as strange but then become part of a contemporary universal language. Touch screens have taken this language to a whole new level, triggering →
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin / Spector Books, ISBN: 978-3959050937, English, 388 pages, 2016, Germany
Co-curators Stephanie Hankey, Marek Tuszynski and Anselm Franke investigate and oppose the accumulation of data in this catalogue of the exhibition “Nervous Systems” at →
Part of “The Download” series, and as such fully downloadable from Rhizome, who commissioned the piece, “Technologies of Care” by artist Elisa Giardina Papa consists of portraits of different types of online workers, six of whom are identified as women, →
The MIT Press / Whitechapel, ISBN-13: 978-0262529341, English, 240 pages, 2016, UK
What is the main difference between a curator and an editor? Apparently it’s mostly attached to the mediums they use (the white box vs. the white page), →
According to studies done in the eighties, there could be a ‘sound’ correlation between increasing drought and the proliferation of wood-eating insects outbreaks on trees. A lack of water causes voids in the lymphatic vessels. Depending on the diameter of the →
Palgrave Pivot, ISBN-13: 978-1137374844, English, 128 pages, 2016, UK
Corporate capitalism is hard to critique, but there are subtle narratives that can produce interesting effects once properly manoeuvred. In this book, Sarah Kember targets the enigmatic “i”, a terrifically effective concept →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262034050, English, 344 pages, 2016, USA
Building upon classic work such as that by anthropologist Roger Callois, Penix-Tadsen contributes to contemporary game studies discourses with his cultural research on Latin American culture. The project has two →
The small blinking plastic boxes that forge a connection with the digital world (and the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT)) have become ubiquitous in private houses, in much the same way as analogue TV sets were a few decades ago. →
