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.
From a semiotic point of view, sequences of 0 and 1 stored in a piece of physical computer memory code not only digital text data (images, animation) but also the instructions used to →
Thinking about gesture in art, people usually refer to choreography. If the topic is related to IT, instead, usability becomes the issue. But, what about gesture in computer art? Does it mean →
In a supposed free-speech society, control over public spaces is paradoxically becoming tighter and tighter and advertising looks more and more like propaganda. Surrounded by ads communicating always the same messages, people →
The ‘hacking’ practice is an overused and misunderstood term in pop culture and contemporary arts. ‘Hacking’ usually carries negative connotations and it is used referring the activity of breaking into computer systems. Nevertheless, →
How does generative art relate to semiotic? Does the randomic association between the signifier and the signified blur the process of meaning construction? If you adehere to the interpretative perspective, that includes the →
Which are the visual rules that are stimulating attention? How abstract objects o image’s areas are look-catalyzing? These are the questions behind View Finder Heatmap, a project inspired by the last 25 →
Youtube, or as we could call it the place of DIY TV, publishes also on the web a huge quantity of rare videos. One of these rarities is the hijacking of the Chicago →
Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of flirting and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites like MySpace are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users →
The progress bar is probably one of the most recognized icons of everyday digital screen-based communication. It expresses time, and the lag the machines are imposing on us, through their hidden coded mechanisms. The →
A series of loose connections, blistering fast and, most of all, completely improvised. These are the traits of a Breadboard Band performance. They use a breadboard for electronic circuits test, producing sessions of audiovisual →
