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.
Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s “Man/Woman in the Middle” is an artwork applying the computer security “man in the middle attack” (an agent altering the communication between two entities), to their own relationship. They set up a server intercepting their →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035545, English, 352 pages, 2017, USA
After the Second World War, Britain’s aspiration to become a world leader in computer technologies was a plan, after the women-driven code-breaking technologies which were developed →
“We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind” affirmed Jacob Bronowski in his 1973 “The Ascent of Man”. Even if we’re convinced that →
The perpetual charging and discharging of batteries has become more than a habit for the human race, it’s a constant concern that never completely goes away, creating a distinct alert zone when it needs our intervention, or when the discharging →
Univ. Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517900496, English, 168 pages, 2018, USA
Non-human organic and inorganic entities have been so rapidly adopted in our everyday reality, that the negotiation of their pervasive role in shaping →
Emerald Publishing Limited, ISBN-13: 978-1787436695, English, 216 pages, 2018, UK
Part of a spread resurgence of materialism, maybe induced by the extensive technological complexity we’re surrounded by, this book is a lucid attempt to →
Baltan Laboratories, ISBN-13: 978-9081583039, English, 123 pages, 2017, The Netherlands
Economy, once a science for experts only, has become ubiquitous in the public debate after the toxic marriage between globalisation and the acceleration of its processes. →
Trevor Paglen never runs short of new ways to use media to conceptually attack the guardians of state espionage, and in his new work, “Weeping Angel”, he is siming his sights at another universal symbol, but this time with a →
Have you ever wondered how you could get paid for the unpaid labour you do for social media giants? We are still far removed from any fair reward for enabling companies like Facebook or Google to make huge profits. If →
Even if we don’t know or notice it, our whole society is the product of methodologies introduced in the early twentieth century, mainly Fordism and Taylorism, conceived to optimise industrial production, scientifically increasing the efficiency of workers. “Tempo Tempo” is →
