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.
Human relationships are based on presence, on exchange, on physicality. And yet, the emptiness of an absence can sometimes take on a significance and power beyond presence itself. Perhaps, in a similar way, artificial intelligence, though far from faithfully tracing →
The ephemerality of sound art persists in the works of various artists who use this ephemerality in similar ways in other media. “Morphology of the Aerial” by electronic musician and a new media artist Mint Park creates air patterns and →
In 2017 Colin Angle, CEO of iRobot, the company that makes the Roomba house cleaner, said in an interview that his company could sell customers’ house map data to big-tech companies to develop their products and services. That statement sparked →
teamVOID‘s “Log” project was inspired by daily updated Covid death figures, and how these lost meaning over subsequent weeks and months. The installation consists of two robotic arms, each engraving an abstract symbol on a transparent acrylic panel every 200 →
How many lives have been lost to the pandemic? For most of us, it’s just a big number (global, national, local) that increases daily. The perception of this huge loss changes when we see the faces of the dead, and →
Adriana Knouf ‘s work can perhaps be described as “xenological”. Humanly and scientifically her research revolves around the analysis, expansion, investigation of the “xenon”, of what is indeed strange, foreign, alien and other. Although this research emanates directly from and →
Komma, Uitgeverij, ISBN-13: 978-9083065502, English, 224 pages, 2020, The Netherlands
Overlap – The no man’s land between art and science has a structure that is conceptually similar to that of a classical almanac, a popular →
The argument about whether or not digitalisation is a good form of preservation is redundant; despite the current digitalisation of everything, it definitely isn’t, technically or conceptually. “Floralia” by Sabrina Ratté builds on this fundamental but widely overlooked contradiction. It →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262044455, English, 472 pages, 2020, USA
Critical Zones is a major exhibition at ZKM, providing a comprehensive look at climate change topics through a vast range of artistic perspectives. Ironically, the →
Gordon Pask was a cyberneticist in the 1950s who experimented with electrochemical systems that exhibited elementary forms of learning. Ralf Baecker has investigated these systems and built a contemporary, evolved version of one of them. In “A Natural History of →
