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.
If we watched with the suspicious eye of the modern spectator a film like ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’, we would be right thinking to the huge amount of money spent by the New York jewelry →
The potentially infinite work Camera Obscura 2005/1-Inf by Przemek Zajfert & Burkhard Walther is based on the sharing of a Pinhole Camera, equipped with a double stenopeic hole, and able to get on a →
The MIT Press – ISBN 0262101106
The old Ludology vs. Narratology antithesis in the game studies field hides the fact that they are two different points of reference (represented by the rules and the →
Every room has a story, every place has an emotional nature, that could be partially derived, but most of all explored and changed. This is the founding principle of theCrystalpunk Workshop for Soft Architecture →
Coniglio Editore – ISBN 8888833730 – The mail art network, self-defined as ethereal, had long conceptually anticipated the telematic one, and its own media (the postcard, the stamp and the rubber stamp) have been →
According to Pasolini, ‘we don’t have a body, we are a body’. Accepting this principle, in a society that traditionally tends to separate mind from body, would change both the social and the linguistic →
Media art, in all its meanings, has always been considered an hard topic to exhibit on. On the one hand problems of taxonomy (what is media art?), on the other its digital, ephemeral, interactive nature, have →
If the telephonic conversation is one of the frames of interaction where, according to Ervin Goffman, people play their identity, then the ‘definition of the self’ and the ‘performance’ are the founding concepts of Tavofono, the →
The AV festival one of the major British festival dealing with electronic art, digital music, games and new media in general, is still running in NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. The main theme of this →
Normally there’s an individual perception of our own shadow? What’s the relationship between the body and its projection in space? This is the area of interest Shadow Bag deals with. It’s an installation by Scott →
