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.
dvd video – Sonic Acts
This rich anthology of works has been produced for the eleventh edition of the homonymous festival and probes deeply the mutual relationship between sound and image through the accumulation →
dvd video – Worm
The ‘live cinema’ concept, or the real time creation of a cinematic narrative, has been developed in the last years with a specific characteristic: the direct ‘manipulability’ of the sound →
dvd video – Asphodel – asp3004
The easy access to the audio-visual production and publishing machines generated not only thousands of easy-to-obtain experiments, but also many interchange possibilities based on an objective evaluation →
dvd video – Lowave – EDV 1394
The abstraction abilities brought by electronic stuff let one separate and reassemble entire phenomena, starting from their transformation in synthetic images, i.e. data conglomerates. In these works →
The combines, from Duchamp to Raushenberg, have always been an inspirational form of expression for audio visual digital art. However the word ‘composition’ has different meanings: it is the combining →
3D graphics, even if it never entered the list of available tools for every user, has had an important aesthetic role in the magma of transformations that stormed the nineties. One of the peculiarities of →
According to its author, the software artist Sven Koenig, Scrambeld?HaCkZ! is a useful tool aimed to infringe copyright. Konig claims that intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting with the principles of any cultural →
Like a digital Betty Love, JillianMcdonald is the protagonist of a mediated love entitled ‘Me and Billy Bob‘. However, if the the heroine of LaBute film has been violently shocked and she is unable →
The use of data for pure aesthetic, ruins the means, and reduce the contents to a shapeless pile of digital material. This is handled as raw material, consisting of almost indistinguishable particles, that value only for →
There’s a hidden ecosystem under the trumpeted broadband explosion. The disturbance element of the data transmission that went wrong are natural events that belong to the net as the water losses of water are of →
