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.
Punctum Books, ISBN: 978-1953035301, English, 486 pages, 2021, USA
If you want to compile a coherent anthology of texts on anonymity, the question of authorship of the individual chapters arises. To encourage collective (and thus anonymous) →
Doors of Listening is a situated work developed by Félix Blume in the Klankenbos forest in Belgium, which also houses an entire open-air sound art museum. It consists of a series of doors donated by some villagers, and if you →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190863845, English, 272 pages, 2019, USA
You won’t open the black box and find a simple ‘if statement’ that reads: ‘if this is a person of colour; then discriminate;’. Similarly, →
In keeping with his tradition of scraping of controversial data, in “Capture” Paolo Cirio has used a series of 1,000 photographs shot during the wave of protests in France, to isolate 4,000 policeman through a Facial Recognition algorithm. This database →
Ben Grosser’s artworks centre on the technical sabotage of social media processes, namely the disruption of the metrics and quantification systems on which the platform’s business models are based. His most recent work “Not For You” is an “automated confusion →
In dystopian times, with multiple perspectives of future catastrophes being announced every now and then, a question often arises: on what OS will we run our devices in the post-apocalypse? “Collapse OS” by Virgil Dupras seems to properly →
Although the Swiss landscapes are known throughout the world for their uncontaminated beauty, in reality they are supported by artificial infrastructures that have shaped these natural environments for decades: dams, tunnels, protection nets, irrigation systems, snow cannons and many other →
Similar to what Philip Dick told us in 1956, in Minority Report, our ‘smart cities’ are now trying to become “safe cities”. There are a lot of IT companies already working with the various military forces, creating mapping systems that →
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Italian, 600 pages, 2019, Italy
There is a body of early work from early activists, sociologists and philosophers who engaged with the sociotechnical impact of information technology just →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089648891, English, 358 pages, 2018, The Netherlands
“Why the 1970s”? This central question relates to the radical and comparatively significant production of underground social movements and media in that particular →
