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.
sQuare, DVD, 2008
This is a documentary film made with passion about passionate musicians. Amy Grill, director, and her husband David Day, a techno enthusiast working at a Cambridge (U.S.)-based music distributor decided →
Greyscale Press, ISBN 978-2-9700706-0-3, August 2010, Format: Paperback, 4.25″ x 6.875″, 122 pages
In her introduction, Ana Carvalho describes the production process of this book as a “wiki-sprint.” It is, in fact, the →
Mechanical Games is an online sports-themed video contest. The five competition categories (lifting weights, swimming, hockey, fencing, volleyball) can be realistically represented or interpreted freely (sometimes with surreal results) through 30-60-minute →
DVD, microcinema
, 2010
Released in 1997 this movie celebrated one of the most underrated woman in the history of technology. In fact, Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace (here interpreted by →
The Fountainhead is the title of a recent version of the 1949 film (directed by King Vidor), made by Société Réaliste, a Parisian art collective founded in 2004 by Ferenc Gróf →
errant bodies – records, #05, 2009
“I wish the medium would be inside me” says Leif Elggren in an interview with the label owner Brandon LaBelle. The uneasiness that characterizes Elggren’s work →
In a black environment of shapes and garbled sounds someone is lurking. The viewer walks through an environment which could well be that of a first-person shoot-em-up videogame: a jungle of logos, text, bright →
dvd, VOL 14, FALL 2009, U.S.A., English
This is the usual excellent selection by Aspect (a bi-annual video-magazine on dvd) on a topic tough to explore: the Middle East. →
C505, Content004, USA, 2009, English
This DVD is a real visual and sound trip. Master of visualization concepts, Yoshihide Sodeoka, is here enjoying the freedom of experimenting with both visual forms and ideas. →
Tim Tate could truly be described as a mixed-media artist. His glass reliquaries are formed from combining glass cases, objects and electronic circuitry, such as speakers, with a small video screen. The screen →
