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 
10:12:01 Multiple Personality.
Multiple Personalities is a current exhibition at Haines Gallery in San Francisco concerning the notion of 'multiple' as a vehicle of information and means to de-emphasize the obsession and privileges of the artistic object. Seven artists are invited to exhibit in the gallery online with as many works of net.art. Michael Daines with 'The Body of Michael Daines', a picture of a sixteen year old (of which you can not see the head and feet), which edition 'unlimited', but signed by the author, was auctioned on Ebay for 50 dollars; Valery Grancher with 'Pump Your Page', which transforms the home page in the user's preferred paintings on paper, thus creating a work of art instantly recognizable fetish on the screen; Mario Hergueta with 'D_Raw', a tool for draw with a mouse that can not make the same design twice, Peter Luining with 'The L Foundation Strategy', an interactive movie and minimalist Shockwave, protected by a frequent pop-up message that, once you purchase the piece, shows, however, the name of the purchaser; Mandiberg Michael with his 'After SherrieLevine.com' (see scans of photos of other photos ); MTAA with 'Time! 2001 Redux ', photo prints while you look on the Internet, John F. Simon Junior 'Every Icon', an applet that creates custom icons in black and white in a grid of 32 by 32 pixels, based on the time of purchase of the applet itself. Even in the 'physics' of the gallery, located in San Francisco, there are several works related to the theme, including some achievements of Barbara Krueger and Karin Sanders.
