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 
23:08:02 The Pleasure of Language.
The transformation of the written language, or better composed via a keyboard, has been extremely rapid in recent years, in which the amount of exchanged messages is increased with geometric progression in the network thanks to invaluable means such as email and chat. These changes are reflected through the distorted lens of net artists who have attempted to contextualize them in a contemporary perspective, and highlighted in the exhibition The Pleasure of Language inauguratasi August 24 at the Netherlands Media Art Institute in Amsterdam. Five selected papers: 'Over / Hear' Brandon LaBelle, a sound installation that spans the harmonic possibilities of language; 'iow inanalbipootv mmif with mftw ibn cotlflgohaha and ISBT' Péter Frucht that transforms graphically in a three-dimensional perspective extracted parts by the continuous flow of chat; 'M [ez] ang.elle', a term that defines the liguaggio poetic mathematical MEZ (Mary Anne Breeze) used in all communications that reflects sound, meaning, programming codes and mathematical symbols, trying to create a language that fully reflects the concept of a worldwide network indormatica; 'hypoderm' but it is the fruit of a collaboration between Netochka Nezvanova and Jaine Evans, and allows you to reveal pieces of text by establishing a physical language of presence, absence and movement , associating words and phrases through a report given by the movements of the users; 'Substitutes' Imogen Stidworthy, is a para-documentary video in which two young singers Romanians in action, and the subsequent reactions to their performance on the part of other people overlap the exhibition make it an original stratification of language and sound. During the inugurazione the show was finally hosted the intervention 'See You' to Kkep, which uses the SMS Ceiling Protocol to customize mobile phones with an image of the eye del'utente.
