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.
. Art 
28.11.01 Straylight online exhibition.
A section of the annual Darklight Film Festival in Dublin this year was dedicated to the works of net.art that, each in its own way, bring into question the ownership of ideas and images. Therefore based on sharing, reusability and control, the selected artists have contributed to the tunnel was built on the official website, the Straylight online exhibition , which also physically, and not just through the link works. Among them: David Phillips and Paul Rowley (digital manipulation in speed and color video historical and social), the Desperate Optimists (panels with the printer to print in color and to be assembled), Shirin Kouladjie (loop visual gestures decontextualized) Kate Southworth and Patrick Simons ('Glorious Ninth', in the image, a generative work that evolves in different directions selectable by the user), Tiia Johannson ('skyscraper.net' an interactive composition of skyscrapers in black and white), Lia ( 're-move.org', geometries frattaliche), V.Mizin ('Let it be' short video on the identification of the consumer in the advertisement), Niall Sweeney (studies of shapes and colors in liquid animation with a minimal soundtrack) David Sherriff ('You are No (w) here', kaleidoscopic images in animation Dublin), Marcus Gosling and Richard Fenwick (video and sound urban computer virus), Seán Hillen ('Untitled Umbrella Project', an online gallery of photos of umbrellas abandoned), Starlab ('stories composed in PHP based on images of the cache and texts that accompany them), Jillian Mcdonald (loop video of scenes from movies and reinterpreted by the author in the other half of the screen). Also present were Peter Luining with Square 4/4 (see Net.art interactive sound ), Joshua Davis (See Praystation ), Conor Mc Garrigle (see 're Not Really Here ).
