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.
NYU Press, ISBN:978-1479806201, English, 464 pages, 2017, USA
Somehow courageously starting with the public admission of how “culture jamming” is a contested term, DeLaure and Fink have coherently embraced the challenge of assembling an anthology that illustrates its course, →
There is no software, at least not here for us to see. Instead we encounter an infrastructure, a system, tethered together with motors, string and elastic, set in motion by chance, generated by the naturally occurring ambient radiation of our →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822362920, English, 256 pages, 2016, USA
Digital apparatuses have induced, over time, a relationship which can be seen as very close to pure ‘devotion’. We care about the mesmerising rituals they fill our life with, but →
Victory over the Sun is an ongoing project (started in 2015) designed by the artist Elisa Balmaceda (developed in collaboration with Celeste Rojas and Francisca Gacitua) within the “Electric Fields” series. The title is a direct reference to the Russian →
Dreams Rewired by Manu Luksch, Martin Reinhart and Thomas Tode is an assemblage of clips from nearly two hundred films, dating from the 1880s to 1930s, which required a lot of research in institutional film archives, as well as private →
If we think for a moment about our compulsive reactions on social media, we can see how unmediated they are, and often based on a few social instincts, including imitation. How We Act Together by Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald →
D21 Kunstraum Leipzig, ISBN-13: 978-3000505027, English, 136 pages, 2015, Germany
The strategical importance of databases for our society has been acknowledged since their explosion in size and the creation of tools to cross-search a number simultaneously. In our current scenario →
SD Card – RecursosRenovables
We open a strange package, made with scraps of comic books and wrapped in a yellow plastic tape. It’s the tape commonly used for building construction or in case of car accident, and all over it →
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, →
