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.
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.
Rapper Prince Harvey, after his computer crashed and his external drive was stolen, managed to record an entire album in Apple Store SoHo in four months, befriending employees, hiding files and using USB sticks and mail. as support. Abbie Hoffman would have been proud.
Despite real time communication (in text, audio, pictures or video) the physical distance from a loved one is still deeply perceived by our bodies. The Space Between Us is a very simple but powerful conceptual app by David Horvitz that →
Iran today does not promote any form of western culture and must comply with strict Islamic religious dictums: it is forbidden to drink alcohol, it is forbidden to have sex before marriage, it is forbidden to dance in public… and →
While various Occupy movements around the world are conducting events on the streets in front of financial and political institutions, in the Czech Republic preferred sites for activism have come to include →
Photo/Nikto is a game for the iPad, designed by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley for the project “Unterplay” of the Master of the Media Design – HEAD Geneve. Its functioning is very →
Phone Storyis a new game by Molleindustria for Android and iPhone (available for Android but already banned by Apple and deleted from the Appstore, because it was charged with violent content and non-compliance →
With most demonstra- tions and street protests it’s hard to know exactly who hurled the first bottle. Amidst a sea of people engaged in a collaborative state of mind, the sense of anonymity generated →
The touchscreens used by smartphones can sometimes undermine the agility of these devices as they often require the use of both hands. But for the (many) people for whom the smartphone is an appendage →
Boskoi is an application for Android mobiles that allows people to create a checklist of geo-localized spontaneous food in urban areas. Created by Joey van der Bie, Maarten van der Mark and Vincent Vijn →
The combination of old and new media can create surprising results. ‘Palmtop Theater’, invented by artists Jitsiru Mase and Tom Nagae is a good example of this. By translating a nineteenth century magic →
In a crowded restaurant a small plastic box attached to a power outlet goes unnoticed. It could be a transformer or a charger. The box conceals, in fact, a small computer capable of mapping →
