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.
Gestalten, ISBN-13: 978-3899556452, English, 240 pages, 2016, Germany
“Photoviz” is a neologism describing classic photographs whose content can also be interpreted as data visualisation (“dataviz”). This homonymous book is edited by Nicholas Felton and is a visually amazing collection, giving →
The loss of reference points in the open sea affects our equilibrium, both physically and psychologically. Seasickness is a kind of vertigo, triggered by the feeling of instability in both our body and the liquid environment we are in. Commissioned →
Meson press eG, ISBN-13: 978-3957960306, English, 276 pages, 2015, USA
In the line of seminal exhibitions that have formulated early visions of new media and art, Les Immatériaux has a special place. Curated in 1985 by Jean-François Lyotard with the help →
We live in a dark age. While this phrase emerges from the middle ages … any excuse is good. Culture? Dark age. Policy? Dark age. Humanitarian rights? Dark age. London, one of the most popular European capitals, wanted to start →
Deep Sweep is a low-cost aerospace probe that intercepts the transmission signals between Earth and the stratosphere, specialising in signals sent to satellites by drones and UAV. The project was conceived and designed by Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölen and Danja →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816695522, English, 224 pages, 2015, USA
There is a never-ending tension between the ‘materiality’ of media and its endless (personal) proliferation, unresolved almost by definition. At the core of most media art preservation strategies, this →
Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet define their Data Drops as a “data sculpturing project”. It uses data from a survey about people’s emotions towards personal data being used by third parties and matches them to a colour according to Robert →
Despite real time communication (in text, audio, pictures or video) the physical distance from a loved one is still deeply perceived by our bodies. The Space Between Us is a very simple but powerful conceptual app by David Horvitz that →
Lars Muller, ISBN: 978-3037784334, English, 112 pages, 2014,
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts is a catalogue of an extremely well researched exhibition of the work of this famous Hungarian painter, photographer and Bauhaus school professor. Alongside a →
Audio recordings of a voice evoke a person and also the period when that person has that specific tone of voice. In our analogue past, tapes were the most popular repositories for voices, as they were personal and cheap media. →
