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 Russia has arrived FindFace, one of the most controversial free software of the recent scene: a facial recognition App that allows users of Vkontakte, Facebook Russian brother with 210 million members, to discover the identity of a person from →
The Mit Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029575, English, 502 pages, 2016, USA
In the book The Stack, On Software and Sovereignty Benjamin Bratton (professor of Visual Arts and the Director of the Center for Design and Geopolitics at the University of California, →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415843058, English, 220 pages, 2016, USA
The most popular theoretical investigations in this second half of the 2010s are mostly tied up with our closest devices (smartphones) and their most used software (social media), untangling our new media →
Departamento de Actividades Editoriales del MNCARS, ISBN: 978-84-8026-539-3, English, 272 pages, 2016, Spain
Ulises Carrión is one of the unsung heroes of media art. He’s one of the few artists who could claim a strategic attitude traversing both media (books, →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517900854, English, 359 pages, 2016, USA
This is an eclectic book with a selection of texts by one of the most prolific authors interested in innovation and media. Hugo Gernsback, mostly known for the eponymous →
The MIT Press / ZKM, ISBN: 978-0262034593, English, 432 pages, 2016, USA
In computing, the definition of “reset” is to “bring a system to normal condition or initial state”. As a concept it is connected to the act of “rebooting.” →
The surgical robot first appeared in operating rooms in the mid-eighties and since then has become established as a reliable and necessary presence, enabling more accurate and less invasive interventions for patients and reducing the risk of post-operative infection and →
The history of mankind through the centuries has seen a succession of many eras, discoveries, successes and failures. The growth of the human race has always gone hand in hand with the growth of consumption, profits, communications, technology and science, →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816699544, English, 632 pages, 2016, USA
The scope of the digital is aptly represented in the scope of the definition of “digital humanities”. Initially acknowledged to be an umbrella term, it is gradually becoming more →
For humans, the conquest of space began in 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched the artificial satellite Sputnik. Since then, more than 4,000 satellites and 500 astronauts have gone into space. Despite the very important scientific discoveries achieved, space →
