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.
cassette – Les Intérêts Spécifiques
Financial trading and affairs permeate all parts of society, influencing every area of human relations through schemes, tactics, and often criminal strategies. There are approximately 12,000 billion dollars hidden in tax havens, claim RYBN, a →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262547420, English, 242 pages, 2024, USA
If the algorithmic automation mechanisms that industry has implemented over the years have severely conditioned the lives and work of countless people, rebalancing these imposed →
peacock & the worm, ISBN 978-1739217921, English, 92 pages, 2023, UK
Research projects generally use the book format both as an archive and as a dissemination medium, sometimes missing the opportunity to understand it as →
Over the years, Jonas Staal has created various works that enable the political empowerment of the individual through collective action. In Propaganda Station, he builds an information and meeting structure in the form of an inverted panopticon. There are ’cells’ →
Can we finally consider the Yes Men’s interventions as ‘canon’? Their ever-effective interventions on capitalism’s spectacle stage continue. At the Web Summit, a man posing as an ‘adidas executive’ announced that they were ‘launching a virtual world for the underpaid →
Using Augmented Reality to make a political comment was not necessarily the first concern of artists, who may have missed an opportunity. J. R. Carpenter & Tomo Kihara have seized this opportunity with their work This is Not a Good →
The cyberpunk science fiction movement distinguished itself from the classic SF in some political stances, often incorporating geopolitics and technological dissent into its stories. The claim that parts of what it envisioned have become reality is quite easy to argue →
We are being given more and more new tools to automatically manipulate images, increasingly altering the realistic elements perceived by our brains. This fascination with altering reality seems to have an irresistible attraction, but also raises many questions about its →
What digital life forms are still hiding in the folds of virtual worlds, living an unseen life that is still animated by code? And what do they represent from a sociological perspective in our digital anthropomorphic ecosystem? These are questions →
Many artists have begun to reflect a growing empathy towards plants, possibly the result of a new connection with nature triggered by the climate crisis. “La plante” by Baron Lanteigne is a virtual representation of a plant using a custom-made →
