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 don’t need to resurrect McLuhan to notice whole armies of technological prosthetics surrounding us. If we stay on a symbolic level there are countless, but even if we restrict our search to the corporeal level there are still a →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029261, English, 528 pages, 2015, USA
Revamping a well-known series of critical anthologies after a few years of limbo, The New Museum and MIT Press have jointly released a new book, and selecting one of the most →
Among the essential qualities of photography are its limited space and unity, a feature that has been deeply altered by digital technologies. Since the first digital photograph, in fact, the rendering of visual information as discreet, instead of continuous as →
IdPure éditions, ISBN-13: 978-970099215, English, 208 pages, 2015, Switzerland
Algorithmic culture, or the culture expressed by automated and particularly software-based systems, has started to garner attention only recently, when its social, cultural and economical consequences have started to become clearly →
Taking a representation of a popular place and stripping out any living presence or natural element not only abstracts its structure, almost shifting it back to an architectural model, it also renders a completely different environment. Hugo Arcier’s “Ghost City” →
John Libbey Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0861967216, English, Italian, 352 pages, 2015, UK
Media art in the second half of the twentieth century is closest to the current post-digital situation, but curiously it is still not properly documented. This is particularly the →
Early electric radio and turntables with their recognizable aesthetics are like totemic symbols in our hyper-mediated present. But they also historically represent an intimate moment of listening, with some artificial light emitted through their structure. This modernist fascination is the →
Paolo Cirio has researched different social systems in his artistic activity, always finding tactical methods to conceptually destabilize these through the use of contextualized and strategic technologies. In Obscurity (after Overexposed) he once more addresses a facial recognition system, but →
RIXC, LiepU MPLab, ISBN-13: 978-9934843433, English, 296 pages, 2015, Latvia
“Data Drift” is both formally issue #14 of the Journal of Acoustic Space and also a selection of papers presented in the 2013 edition of the Media Art Histories conference, →
Google Poetics, or the art of the “autocomplete” has become a genre, as can be observed in works such as “Autocompleteme” by Jérôme Saint Clair and Benjamin Gaulon, or “Google Poems” by Sampsa Nuotio. Some of their strength is in →
