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 
02/20/02 Net art in the collection of the Guggenheim.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has acquired in its permanent collection the two works of net art that was commissioned by the beginning of this year. It is 'Unfolding Object' of John F. Simon Jr (pictured), and 'net.flag' by Mark Napier. The first is a square that carries out its other faces stimulated by the user's click, checking if you want to follow the route taken by previous users or usher your own in a classic metaphor of creativity. In net.flag, however, Napier allows you to distort the nationalistic symbols of their flags allowing you to change the colors and thus undermine the territory of Identity: changes in the network characteristics. According to Jon Ippolito, the associate curator for media arts institution, for these acquisitions "the goal is both to demonstrate our belief that these forms of expression should be protected, and that there is a method to do it." And Steve Dietz, curator of new media for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis agrees "What the Guggenheim is doing is what every institution of contemporary art should do, and that is to treat the net art like any other contemporary artistic phenomenon of its collection. " But as the code is stored? For each work are paid from 10,000 to $ 15,000 in exchange for the code is granted for it to be performed in a unique manner. Doubts aside on the latter condition, the Guggenheim has allocated a fund of preservation, the Variable Media Endowment for the protection of the works that fall into obsolescence. Another question is how they work, because they have a meaning thanks to user input, so there are three copies running simultaneously in different cities. The same Ippolito however admitted that the price that is paid is in fact to support the work of the artist, rather than to pay the artifact, but in this way is constantly being 'kept alive', making the museum as the ' historical archive of their work, that is what is already being done for the other works of art.
