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.
Set Margins, ISBN 978-9083350134, English, 300 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
Lorusso has established a clear narrative on his social media channels that is ironic, if not sarcastic. It is about the exploitation of designers, their →
Tresor, ISBN 978-3985954773, English, 352 pages, 2022, Germany
Techno and Berlin just go together. This alliance has influenced a worldwide movement of music, aesthetics, technology and culture that has shaped an entire generation. In the →
How heavy is the cloud? It is not easy to refute its iconic meaning, which is soft and particularly light, not to mention its total invisibility, except for some elements in GUIs. The harsh reality of heavy and energy-devouring servers, →
The concept of the loop is seminal in computer programming, and probably one of the most emblematic to the history of industrial automation. In “Perpétuité I,” Felix Luque Sanchez built a mechatronic system in a loop in which one machine →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262039648, English, 136 pages, 2019, USA
When design enables an underlying structural revelation, it transcends its usual purpose of supporting the enjoyment of content, elevating the printed medium to a higher level. →
Spector Books OHG, ISBN-13: 978-3959053105, English, 784 pages, 2019, Germany
Drone images have rapidly introduced a substantial perspectival gap into our already overwhelmed visual faculties. This is the most spectacular change we have experienced →
Custom electronic music instruments have a tradition that largely stems from DIY techniques, taking a functional more than formal approach, with hardware components usually very visible in the final release. Love Hultén’s “Evoboxx” defies these expectations. Officially described as a →
Black Dog Press, ISBN-13: 978-1910433225, English, 192 pages, 2018, UK
The seminal “See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception”, in 2011 created waves in the design community. Illustrating cutting edge sensory-based projects developed over time, →
Art Book Magazine, ISBN-13: 978-2821600959, English, 194 pages, 2018, France
In digital art, one of the first reference point is the (im)materiality of the subject with the many repercussions it has in its creation and design. This has led →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN-13: 978-3775744539, English, 224 pages, 2018, Germany
The complexity and the multi-disciplinarity of the Anthropocene are among the main causes of its still weak cultural and political impact, contrasting an already slightly devastating →
