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 
6/10/02 Trigger: Game Art, art of video games in Melbourne.
It ended a few days at the range space of Melbourne (Australia), Trigger: Game Art , a large exhibition of video games and videos that have to do with this kind of imagery. Curated by Rebecca Cannon exhibition explores the many different skills and techniques, as in 'Quilted through organ' of Delire and 'Skin Pack' (pictured) of Erceg + Savior, who build their poetics from the Quake engine, the first turning it into a musical instrument that is played with the objects and user interactions, while the second shows four of the characters of the game bare, drawing on porn movies for sound samples. Web-game, however, are 'Nerve Game' of Sowerwine + Wilczek and 'Blam' Isobel, respectively, a game that mixes a comic book and another whose goals are very unclear to the player. In 'Level 5' Mastrantone, then you rebuild the exhibition space through the public code of Unreal Tournament, while 'All Your Base' to show the video game Zero Wing with a famous opening sentence, badly translated into English by Japanese, became an object of worship. 'Urban Invasion' documents the performance of Space-invaders, French symbols of the aliens who sows to the hit game around the cities he visits. Very different approaches in 'Matrix' and 'Tum Raider' Strange Company, in which software robots play against users within a LAN, the application of which is even more evident in 'The Buff and the brutal' of Droma Production in which a soap opera is staged gladiatorial day. Do not miss the freebies microchips eighties, from 'Arcade 84' by Dave Dries, a video made with materials of MAME, 'Smile and Fresh' Isobel, examples of games that come back to 8-bit aesthetics of ' Video Computer Systems' Golden Shower, a band that claims to have the sole purpose of 'the return of the world to what they were the eighties' and finally' Poly800vs6581 'by Tim Koch + Frog Bomb pairing to melodies composed with the C64 SID images of old computers. To represent the imaginative degeneration of the codes there are 'Gameboy_ultraF_uk' (see Software art: Gameboy autodegeneranti. , and 'Nestune' of Collapscone that uses a NES (Nintendo Entertainment Sysytem) for corrupting graphics and sound.
