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.
HMKV/Kettler, ISBN 9783941100008, Germany, 2008, English
Armin Medosch wisely reminds us in the beginning of his introductory essay that “we’ve been an electromagnetic society for over one hundred years”. Waves are all over →
Errant Bodies, ISBN 9780977259410, U.S.A. / Denmark, 2007, English
This is another essential book for any artist interested in sound, originated by the clever and productive mind of Brandon Labelle, a →
Revolver, ISBN 9783865884534, Germany, 2008, English
Radio is one of the mediums whose death has been announced many times. But as a phoenix, it systematically arises from its own ashes, finding new →
Kning Disk, ISBN 9789197666701, Sweden, 2007, English
Henrik Rylander is an artist, musician and photographer. This work is a large format book of photographs of loudspeakers taken in the three largest Swedish →
“Tantalum Memorial“, by the artists Harwood, Wright, Yokokoji is a telephony-based memorial built from a 1938 telephone exchange rescued from the old Alumix factory in Bolzano, Italy which is meant to address the →
The public installation project Street Radio has been recently launched by Armin Medosch at the central Southampton railway station, and it’ll last till November 2008. Medosch has realized a radio network drawing on →
dvd – RIXC
Using for artistic purposes a radio-telescope, active during the cold war as an important technological articulation of the Soviet military power, stands out as one of the few cases in →
The ability of electronic media to make any image ‘temporary’ through its digital visualization follows the temporarity of today’s informations and the shift from the stability of printed media to the transient disembodied light of pixels. →
One of the peculiar aspects of streamed transmissions is the immediate delocalization of informations, thanks to the pervasive structure of the net which allows a personal and continuous ‘international telecast’, bringing any local content to →
