Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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-13: 978-1517907082, English, 416 pages, 2019, USA
Variations on Media Thinking is a much needed selection of Zielinski’s texts for non-German speakers, made of eighteen translated essays, produced over several decades. The →
Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1501337116, English, 202 pages, 2019, USA
How much do we value ‘physical materiality’ in the 2020s? In the dominant tradition of media theory it seems to be valued very little, as either the ’meaning’ or →
Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9493148161, English, 260 pages, 2019, The Netherlands
Despite the fact that this book is extremely contemporary, it seems to emerge from the best traditions of 1970s-1980s counterculture. The author has a diversified background and quite →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190949990, English, 264 pages, 2019, UK
It’s been more than two decades since Erik Davis’ Techgnosis kindled a collective interest in the mystical impulses underpinning the rise of information technologies. Believing in Bits reconvenes →
Springer, ISBN-13: 978-3319710389, English, 214 pages, 2019, Switzerland
One of the most fascinating promises of the early networked media was the possibility for collective, simultaneous collaboration by users in geographically discrete spaces. Something that is assumed by →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089648891, English, 358 pages, 2018, The Netherlands
“Why the 1970s”? This central question relates to the radical and comparatively significant production of underground social movements and media in that particular decade. Guerilla Networks →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262039024, English, 200 pages, 2018, USA
As with other phenomena now implicated in our growing dependence on online media, the archiving of web data has become essential for addressing our recent past. →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517902735, English, 376 pages, 2019, USA
While overlooked by many, especially in academia, China is increasingly becoming a different planet, spinning at a different speed. Worse still, Western cultures know and →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501333231, English, 288 pages, 2018, UK
Our visual memory has been under the public lens of science since neurology became a debated topic in popular media. Personal memory, and its importance for our personal identity →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038904, English, 288 pages, 2018, USA
We might attempt to place Spotify historically as the most recent milestone in the universal digitalisation of music after Napster, iTunes and the iPod/iPhone. But the major shift with →
