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.
Time’s Up, ISBN-13: 978-3200030756, English, 160 pages, 2013, Austria
The archival value of books is tested – for example – in the “catalogue’” concept for preserving coherent and exhaustive information about exhibitions, and in the “documentation” concept for the same →
ScareMail is Benjamin Grosser’s answer to Prism: a browser extension to defend our email from surveillance by the National Security Agency. Once installed, ScareMail automatically generates a meaningless story within each email; one able to ostentatiously attract the interest of the →
Baltan Laboratories, English, 144 pages, 2013, The Netherlands
Establishing an effective formal relationship between digital art and physical art spaces such as museums and galleries – one of the missing links in contemporary art – was the aim of “Collecting →
Gestalten, ISBN-13: 978-3899554861, English, 80 pages, 2013, UK
Nicolai’s science-oriented artworks have some unique characteristics including a polarised shifting between complexity and simplicity that always deeply involves our senses. It is not by accident that his intellectual proximity to long →
That privacy is in danger, by now, everyone knows. that. The threats can come from external causes, maybe institutional, but also by our own behaviors. A photo published on the web thoughtlessly or reveal their habits on some social network…rare →
nai010 publishers, ISBN-13: 978-9462080317, English, 240 pages, 2013, The Netherlands
Florian Cramer is widely acknowledged as one of the key theorists of net.art and software art, although from there he has expanded his research in the last decade into a →
Many foods such as coffee, wine, chocolate and honey belong to the list of foods commonly used that as a result of ongoing climate change, could soon lose or do not grow in the same regions or with the same →
EYEsect is an oblong and amorphous helmet coated with a mirror. It provides users with a very particular visual experience, one that is both binocular and stereoscopic. Two cameras are positioned at the bottom of two extendable arms, anchored on →
The Incredible Bob’s art installation Parallax consists (externally) of a pair of binoculars. Its standard function however has been revolutionized (in the true sense of the word), exploiting the optical phenomenon of parallax (if you change the point of observation an →
Telepathy Advertising presents itself as the first communication agency specialized in extra-sensory techniques, able to convey an advertising message directly into the prospective customer’s mind. Using knowledge of neuromarketing, its promotional campaigns aim to induce the same reactions and emotions →
