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 
04.04.02 State of the Arts, symposium on electronic literature.
From April 4 to 6 is held at UCLA in Los Angeles (USA) State of the Arts, Electronic Literature Organization Symposium , a three-day festival on the different aspects and evolutions of electronic literature. Three are the expected 'keynotes', ie interventions prominent, those of the critique of author Katherine Hayles' How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics', the writer Robert Coover, author of the historical essay of '92' The End of Books' and Jason Epstein, former editorial director of Random House. In the rest of the program are various seminars, including one on the assembly of hypertext, 'Navigating the Borders – Edges and Interfaces', the hybridisation of genres (short story, film, video games, etc..) In which it is present among others Lev Manovich, author of 'The Language of New Media', while 'The Writers Looking Ahead' also intervenes Stuart Moulthrop, author, inter alia, of hypertext fictions 'Victory Garden' and 'Hegirascope'. In 'Multimedia Criticism' note is the presence of Robert Kendall author of the book hypertext poem 'A Life Set for Two', and 'Electronic Literature in the University' that of the artist Victoria Vesna, author of the famous work of net art ' Bodies Inc. ', whereas in' Technique: Tools for Cross-Fertilization and Interactivity 'there is the presence of Bob Stein, founder of the historic Voyager Company, a production of excellent CD-ROM copyright. Two performances, finally, edited by Shelley Jackson with his tales feminist 'The Doll Games' and the group 'The Unknown' with the story hypertext 'The End of the Tour'.
