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.
Be patient, the desert is coming. Every year, humanity loses about seven million hectares of fertile land due to the advancement of the desert areas of the world, a phenomenon known as desertification. The main causes, in addition to climate →
Zero Books, ISBN-13: 978-1780992389, English, 271 pages, 2014, Turkey
We still have no comprehensive understanding of networks. Technological and economic impacts are reasonably well-documented but we are likely scratching the surface of social and political consequences. The author here embraces →
By now, we are all sadly accustomed to advertising. Long before the culture of marketing developed a professional sector, advertising had already learned to live and to take shape within and through all types of known media. The dense shadow →
Have you ever tried to give pocket money to spendthrift software? Mediengruppe Bitnik unleashed an online shopping bot at Agora Market Place, one of the most flourishing markets of the deep‐web. With a budget of $100 a week in Bitcoin →
booklet, USB Flash Drive – chdh.net
The packaging of this release immediately attracts our attention: a 16×29 cm hardcover in opaque black with the CHDH crew logo, a USB, and grey fold-out pages containing theoretical texts and explanatory diagrams. Égregore →
Near Future Laboratory, ISBN-13: 978-0990563303, English, 112 pages, 2014, USA
The Whole Earth Catalog was a revolutionary publication, conceived by Stewart Brand and published irregularly from 1968 to 1998. With the slogan “access to tools,” it listed and reviewed a →
William Heinemann, ISBN-13: 978-0434023158, English,, 320 pages, 2014, UK
In the early public era of the Internet (the second half of the nineties), the dream of finally having a horizontal medium, enabling many-to-many communication, free from censorships and time/space/money constraints →
The subway is an “in-transit” zone, although more and more people feel it to be a space continuous with “outside” life, thanks to the visual continuity guaranteed by their interconnected screens. Street musicians who spend most of their time in →
Satoshi Nakamoto, the acknowledged creator of Bitcoin, has left only two public traces: an alleged picture and a date of birth. He strictly preserves his own privacy through an always changing IP address and using English that reveals no specific →
Cornerhouse Publications, ISBN: 978-0956957177, English, 272 pages, 2014, UK
Hinting at the liquid definition of “post-internet”, the title of this book successfully expresses the process underpinning this concept. This is an anthology with contributions from twenty-two artists who undertook a →
