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 
05/13/02 Net art Italian: New virus Epidemic + Their Circular Life + Hypermacbeth.
– ' bocconi.vbs 'is the name of the new virus produced by the Milanese collective of the epidemic, consistent with their premise that wants to take on more the characteristics of the transmission of life, the fear of contagion. This time it is a 'brand virus' that exploiting the usual mechanisms of Microsoft Outlook, it sends itself as an attachment to any e-mail address available on the host system, inviting the user to visit the site of Bocconi, in addition to creating a text document (bocconi.txt) in the startup directory. In this way, a screen containing the logo Bocconi in ascii characters appear at every system startup. The spread so provocatively wants to coincide with the creation of a virus that ennobles those who receive it, he having acquired a status exclusive to own a trademark on your pc, through a selective viral mechanism, all in the temple of research on growth in brand values.
– Their Circular Life is a work in flash by Lorenzo Fonda and David Terenzi, which tells the circularity of events in certain places of the city, with the help of photos available bilinearmente, but in an interactive manner, and accompanying them with short sounds and noises environment. As if it would respond to these unwritten laws living spaces equal to themselves according to a recurrence circular, in fact, that designates them as places with unique characteristics. The project is open and, following the instructions provided by the authors, would like to expand with external voluntary contributions.
– Dlsan is the author of ' The HyperMacbeth ', an interesting work that makes non-linear text of William Shakespeare's masterpiece, allowing the visitor to choose the next dialog via appropriate link. Predominantly structured to use a bilingual (English / Italian), the work fits small abstract animations and sounds that together with the random choices of the code in javascript animate the screen populating it with new ways of life, in an original structure.
