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.
Index, Index 046, German, 2016, Austria
Observing other people staring at their smartphone screen for hours, we’d wonder what should represent a similar cultural endeavour to what video art represented in the seventies for television? If →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN-13: 978-3775743624, English, 112 pages, 2017, Germany
Instagram as a visual and social phenomenon, with its seven hundred million users worldwide, should be one of the favourite topics and virtual spaces for student →
ECAL Editions, ISBN-13: 978-2970115748, English, 206 pages, 2017, Switzerland
Defining photography as a medium is not a simple task after the digitalisation of everything, since online it’s just endlessly produced and reproduced without any possible effective →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036498, English, 264 pages, 2017, USA
Iconoclast artist Fred Forest has been acknowledged only recently for his fringe artist tactics over the last sixty years. An artist with a modern approach →
Appropriating a person’s physical data to generate programmed videos arbitrarily making use of it is technically demonstrable, using biometry and neural networks. Although outputs are still raw, the ethical concerns can arise rapidly, especially after elaborating proper manipulations. Quasimondo (Mario →
The evolution of sculptures through technologies has crossed used materials and manufacturing processes, but they’re still giving shape to concepts present in our world. Even when it’s about digital technologies, sculptures have to manifest themselves, like in the case of →
Communications technology has accustomed us to rapid developments that seem to tend to accelerate further. The web first, telephony after, plus all the declinations and variations on the theme: streaming, chatting, blogging … and this is only talking about the →
Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN-13: 978-1118475201, English, 632 pages, 2016, UK
After her own several updated editions of the anthological “Digital Art” (Thames and Hudson), Christiane Paul has edited another collection of texts aiming to define digital →
With an exquisite corpus of work under his wing that in October 2017 earned him a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant to pursue his work in ‘documenting the hidden operations of covert government projects,’ Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, scuba diver, →
The symbolic value of a 3D printer has lowered from a machine that would have ‘fixed’ our daily reality on multiple levels, to one of the many tools to produce something valuable. This technology has suffered the same evolution crisis →
