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.
Exploring the urban space with the nose: the work “Blind Smell Stick” by Peter de Cupere invites us to rediscover the familiar spaces in which we live. The object created →
Rer Megacorp [2CD + book], ISBN: 9780956018410, 80 pages, 2012, English
Peter Cusack has traveled to what he defines as “dangerous places”, including sites that have suffered environmental devastation (think Chernobyl) and locations at the →
The grid swallows us. Increasingly it defines and shapes our positions. Italian artist Paolo Cirio uses this uncomfortable fact as the basis for a new work. Street Ghosts reveals a sense of the →
ROOM 40, Book + 3″ CD, Dec 2010, RMBK001, ISBN-13: 978-0980814903
Collaborative sound mapping, random field recording, sonic memory and live transmission from specific sites are various approaches that have been explored and used in →
“Images are meant to render the world accessible and imaginable to man” Villem Flusser wrote in his well-known 1983 book “Towards a Philosophy of Photography” which analyzed the transition from prehistoric, traditional images →
Check the Habitar photo set here.
Invisible Architectures: the curiosity generated by this paradox is the starting point of Habitar – Bending the urban frame, the new stage of the broader curatorial path taken by →
Melville House, ISBN 978-0091636586, USA, 2008, English
The representation of space, the reclaiming of space and the recoding of space through a collective negotiation of coordinates and facts are a few of the →
As someone who lives in a major metropolitan city and travels constantly, Google’s “Maps” and “Earth” applications are an essential necessity for finding my way through these urban landscapes. Whether it’s to meet →
Anti datamining is a transversal research project based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of internet financial data flows. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in real-time. The project finds →
Sun Run Sun is an audio installation by media artist Yolande Harris, made during a residency at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Montevideo), in Amsterdam. The project investigates different modes of perception →
