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 
25.09.02 Villette Numérique, biennial of new media art in Paris.
There were certainly spared the organizers of Villette Numérique , the first biennial of new media art inaugurated in Paris on September 24 in the science park of the famous 'Villette Cité des Sciences'. The program of the event, in fact, is full of excellent guests and collaborations in preview, covering the broad spectrum of digital creations. For seven days will alternate sounds, sights and performance, providing a 360 degree perspective and combining creativity and production methods. To begin the contest works on the web has been allocated in the first place 'Werkstatt Wuerfel Web (Web Cube)' Ukrainian Akuvido, aka Victor Dovhalyuk, a cube deconstructed in order to provide an alternative view of three dimensional space. The second prize instead went to New York and Ruth Ron Inbar Barak, with their 'Volume' a game in 3d minimal with five lines and five urban environment sounds. The third prize is awarded if the finally with Nicolas Clauss 'One Day on the Air' a work in shockwave that uses 16 samples of French radio stations for a national soundscape ether. On the sound front are planned three concerts of Kraftwerk, the debut of the new 'supergroup' audio / visual GRM (Musical Researches group) with Christian Fennesz, Arnaud Rebotini and Ryoji Ikeda, and the new meeting between Carsten Nicolai Mikka Vaino, not mention the amount of international DJs (well thirty-four) who will pack the 'Nuits Electro'. Two large exhibitions round out the list of events: 'Play Time' with a retrospective of video games from the seventies to the present day with the full usability of the machines from the public, and a number of excellent artists performace (Miltos Manetas, Eric Zimmerman, Joshua Davis, Jim Avignon), the 'Digit @ rt exhibition', however, seeks to take stock of the latest trends of the interaction, through digital creations and generative applications. But around the large rooms of the citadel of science you can come across sound installations, choreography virtual and digital cinema (selections Resfest, Onedotzero and Rotterdam Film Festival among other projections), and seminars and meetings to analyze trends and transformations, helping development transalpine of these issues still on the sidelines of the official events.
