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.
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 →
Even if we don’t know or notice it, our whole society is the product of methodologies introduced in the early twentieth century, mainly Fordism and Taylorism, conceived to optimise industrial production, scientifically increasing the efficiency of workers. “Tempo Tempo” is →
Taking a representation of a popular place and stripping out any living presence or natural element not only abstracts its structure, almost shifting it back to an architectural model, it also renders a completely different environment. Hugo Arcier’s “Ghost City” →
John Libbey Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-0861967216, English, Italian, 352 pages, 2015, UK
Media art in the second half of the twentieth century is closest to the current post-digital situation, but curiously it is still not properly documented. This is particularly the →
Von Archives, VON 022 DVD, English, 12-page booklet, 2015, USA
The Futurist Manifesto is a performance from 2009, produced to celebrate the centenary of the original Futurist Manifesto published on Le Figaro in 1909. Starting with the paradoxical consideration that →
University Of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226002736, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Among the overlooked aspects of the “digitalisation of everything” is the perception of colours on screens, and how they are produced (or better, “performed”). In this thoroughgoing research project →
