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 
15:10:02 Neen, a name for the art on the net.
Define one word the activity of those who produce artistic works or operations on-line network can be very simplistic if we think of the multiplicity of personalities and intentions that animate the web, from software creators to web designers, from operations collaborative online to web performance. The vague term 'net art' evidently did not meet Miltos Manetas, eccentric artist from Los Angeles, who two years ago commissioned the Lexicon Branding (note marketing company that has launched new names as PowerBook and Pentium) the difficult task of finally a name to the web-art. The creative staff of the lexicon proposed more than 100 words including Neen, a palindrome created by a computer program fed with words such as Screen and Esc: Manetas according to the times in which we live are Telic, that is boring, sophisticated and square, while Neen is the word that best relates to the art he has in mind: bizarre, unexpected and often useless. If Telic is a term that represents the trend earnest in dealing with the technological tools, Neen is the product of unexpected and unpredictable Telic. Neen , then, is to Neenster says Manetas, such as the fantasy was to furrealisti or as the freedom to communists . The Neenster do not follow the footsteps of the pioneers of the web, but glide skating on the surface of the web with the elegance of dandies. Their gestures, their operations and their work attitudes reminiscent of the Dada and Pop art: create animations often lack a sense and a utility (think of the bachelor machines Dadaist), buy a web domain to fill only the home page (www.biribiri.com, www.guydebord.com, www.togetherness.org, www.jesusswimming.com), are presented to the public as their wealthy young bored by all this chaos around new media, lead a battle against copyright spending most of their time copying and downloading each kind of material that travels on the network. Neen and Neenster, just as Dada and the Dadaists, do not have a precise identity for their work, they are often deliberately contradictory in their ideas, and what emerges is the desire to shake up and overturn the concept of art for the web that, Manetas' opinion, is too staid and inelegant. If your imagination has led to ridicule the surrealists and the revolution he led the Communists in bad water, it will be interesting to note where Neen will bring Neenster.
Clement Pestelli
