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.
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.
Rapper Prince Harvey, after his computer crashed and his external drive was stolen, managed to record an entire album in Apple Store SoHo in four months, befriending employees, hiding files and using USB sticks and mail. as support. Abbie Hoffman would have been proud.
Disputes about global warming between different groups often come down to competing interpretations of data – to building evidence or dismissing it. Intellectual dispute sometimes hides that these are vital questions with very physical implications. Time and Tide Bell →
W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393244816, English, 400 pages, 2015, USA
One of the most striking paradoxes of our time resides in our smartphones. Our everyday use of these iconic and progressively factotum apparatuses records at various levels every →
Look around on a typical day at an exhibition of modern and contemporary art and you’ll probably find curious students in search of inspiration; professionals (who always seems to be doing something important); invigilators counting down the hours; loving couples →
20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes is a performance by Darsha Hewitt, staged at the 2015 Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress. Hewitt builds twenty small electronic circuits with wires, chips, small components and nine-volt batteries in twenty minutes. The time →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816694419, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
We can attempt a definition of “information overload” as a perceived disproportion between the quantification of the information we ingest and our capacity to metabolise it. Clearly this is not →
Looking at western news and commentaries, Beijing often looks like the Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner, with an unbearably high level of pollution that has at times pushed authorities to forbid people from leaving their homes. The Chinese performance →
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 →
Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 978-1137437198, English, 320 pages, 2015, UK
The sudden rise of the term “postdigital” in recent digital humanities scholarship is maybe due to the need for a new word to describe the current, edgy human condition. The postdigital →
There’s still a small percentage of people, especially in western culture, who might think that their public image is not dependent on their online presence, and there should be even fewer people thinking that social media are not a compelling →
MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262029513, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
One of the major problems with perceiving digital content comes with negotiating the gap between the invisible virtual space and the physical infrastructures we move through. Think of the bewildering feeling →
