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 
14:05:02 Metapet, videogame art workers genetically modified.
On May 15, is launched in Los Angeles' Metapet ', an online game created by Natalie Bookchin with Jin Lee, Cathy Davies and Mark Allen. It is the first self-proclaimed 'transgenic virtual pet game', a strategy game set in a biotech company of the future, in which the player must choose between them as well as a 'Metapet', ie a human being amended in the manner of 'Nexus 6' in Blade Runner. The resulting change in the system consists of a gene obtained from a trained dog obedience, which is the determining factor to get a new class of workers more loyal and productive than the previous one. The institutions targeted in this representation are three main social and economic, that is, the biotechnology industry, the gaming industry and the 'corporate culture' in the broad sense. The sarcasm towards technical becere incentive to the production by the latest generation of personnel managers, is played down, and then made even more effective by the game, making plausible an extreme situation of workers subjected genetically and ensnared by those who want to their only maximum profit. But the player will discover that also honing the alternation of carrot and stick, this may not be enough to keep under control the metapet, and that the workers are still able, however, to resign, form a start-up or organize a union. The dehumanization of corporate life is staged, the paradox could be playing it from your workplace … It should be noted, finally, that within Metapet there are also minigames made by Amy Alexander, Davis & Davis, Carmin Karasic, Jeff Knowlton, Anne-Marie Schleiner, Naomi Spellman, Karl Mihail, T. Kim-Trang and Paul Vanouse.
