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.
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), or the “tingling sensation moving down the back of the neck and upper spine”, has inspired the production and upload of millions of YouTube videos designed to induce it. The powerful physical feeling induced from →
Ben Grosser’s artworks centre on the technical sabotage of social media processes, namely the disruption of the metrics and quantification systems on which the platform’s business models are based. His most recent work “Not For You” is an “automated confusion →
The deep-fake is one of the most groundbreaking digital cultural phenomena of the 2010s. It helped to demolish the last remnants of trust in mass media, developed over decades of journalism and editing in general. It has been quickly adopted →
Mimesis Edizioni, ISBN-978-88-5754-212-6, Italian, 304 pages, 2019, Italy
In many contemporary artistic practices, the consequences of some experimentations now temporally distant are still able to set new meanings and to trigger unprecedented developments and stylistic →
“A Woman with the Technology” by Ziyang Wu is a complex process focused on AI and the so-called ‘filter bubble’. It starts by selecting a series of keywords close to the artists’ focus. His daily activity is then recorded and →
Alta Tecnología Andina, ISBN-13: ISBN: 978-6124793509, English, Spanish, 592 pages, 2018, Perù
This 600-page tome, including texts in both Spanish and English, is a historical account, compiled through multiple voices, of the Peruvian video →
It is quite hard to be completely aware of our addiction to screens. Being increasingly exposed to the combination of specific sizes, light and colours has probably produced archetypes in our mind, which are easily triggered when a similar presence →
LP – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French →
canecapovolto/Scuola FuoriNorma, USB Drive, Italian, 2018, Italy
Experimental music is usually not tied up to a specific territory, with some exceptions. In Italy, Sicily is one of them, and one of the historical groups traversing →
Artificial Intelligence has found its place in the hearts of artists and designers much more than it seems to have done in the average population. The “living machine” has become a place of illusion in confidence and disillusion when the →
