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.
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822369400, English, 216 pages, 2017, USA
“Due to an intensification of electronic signals […] the perception of the other and its body is reshaped” affirms Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, and →
“Recruitment gone wrong” is a work by Thomson & Craighead, inspired by actual events which took place at the Wisconsin University in 2013. There a National Security Agency (NSA) recruitment drive was turned into a kind of public question time →
There’s a whole thread in media art about defining a portrait not through a face, but intimate data univocally connected to the person. Since our bureaucratic identity is solely made of digital data, as is most of our mediated sociality, →
Fabien Léaustic’s “Monolithe” is a monolith hosting the biotope of a phytoplankton growing outside water and producing oxygen, which affects the visitor’s environment. It’s living artwork, with a recognisable symbolic form, open to interpretations, and with a structurally modified ecosystem, →
The battles for Internet freedom started the very moment it became a global phenomenon. From the opposition to cookies to the Net Neutrality defence, internet citizens’ rights have systematically succumbed to the lobbying power of corporations. In this context, artists →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822369738, English, 448 pages, 2017, USA
Drones seem to be the protagonist of the digitalisation of the tridimensional space. Their capability to address a precise single spatial point through x,y,z coordinates →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036207, English, 256 pages, 2017, USA
What kind of ‘materiality’ can be found in our global digital infrastructure? Coupling the tangible hardware presence, the processes presumed to run the whole system →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816696086, English, 232 pages, 2017, USA
The social impact of violent videogames has historically been a quite popular issue, generating lively debates in the pyramidal world of mass media first, →
With an exquisite corpus of work under his wing that in October 2017 earned him a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant to pursue his work in ‘documenting the hidden operations of covert government projects,’ Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, scuba diver, →
Delegating to machines is an escalating practice in Western social systems. Along this line new apps and autonomous systems, acting on our behalf, are progressively meant to control or manage non-trivial aspects of our lives, including the totemic Alexa, Siri, →
