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.
“We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind” affirmed Jacob Bronowski in his 1973 “The Ascent of Man”. Even if we’re convinced that →
The perpetual charging and discharging of batteries has become more than a habit for the human race, it’s a constant concern that never completely goes away, creating a distinct alert zone when it needs our intervention, or when the discharging →
“entangled” is an installation by HC Gilje, which uses sophisticated technology to play with the digitalisation of space and its new perspectives. The artist has used the laser scanning technique LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) to create a “cast of →
There are many photographic artistic devices, built in recent years to critically analyse the intromission of new technologies in the photographic aesthetic process. Prosthetic Photographer is one of these: thanks to machine learning training this device learns to recognise pictures →
The specific legal status of an artwork has become itself a topic in artworks, mainly after the art market has begun to shape a specific shady financial system of its own.
“The Offshore Tour Operator” by RYBN.ORG is a GPS-powered →
Combining the choreographic seduction of analogue machines, with the reassessing of a different function, “The Optical Sound Orchestra” by Mariska de Groot – who has long been fascinated by the possibilities of sound – is an exemplary performative media act, →
Univ of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517902438, English, 235 pages, 2017, USA
Signs, meanings and cultural forms are stratified, embedded, set and exchanged in our urban spaces. Our perception of these spaces and their infrastructure, channelling signals →
Installations in the form of musical autonomous machines have the same hidden power to attract as autonomous creatures, as we attribute music and even more singing as an exclusive ability of sentient beings. The sounds associated with the movement reinforce →
A 1950s-style Bakelite telephone is the core of the installation by Stephanie Cormier and Dave Dyment for Untitled [Eavesdrop]. However, the strong retro aesthetic of the work conceals a conceptual technological short-circuit. Inside the device there is a smartphone that →
The crudeness of the presently available environmental data has strong symbolic value, and its possible representations should reinstate the awareness of the Global Warming threat, also when enhanced by challenging aesthetic positions. Chris Cheung (a.k.a. h0nh1m) works with audio-visual representation →
