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.
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11.12.02 Pattern Recognition, the latest book by William Gibson.
‘Pattern Recognition‘, the latest book by William Gibson, one of the chief exponents of the cyberpunk movement, will be out on February 2003 in the USA. The press releases tell that the book will be published by Putnam and will be 370 pages long. Set for the first time in present times, the book follows the intuition of his friend Sterling, who abandoned some years ago the sceneries of the near future, setting his stories against the background of contemporary events instead. The social need of imagining a future is probably over, replaced by that of interpreting a present far too complex and interesting. The book tells the story of Cayce Pollard, a marketing consultant living in London, in the September 11th aftermath, following the traces of an Internet subculture populated by users obsessed by the release of mysterious filmed shots, and his task is discovering their source. The main character is hired by a corporation trying to push a new logo of a shoe product, and she travels the continents together with the yellow hues which cross it and her aversion to logos. Gibson’s themes are still the same (globalization, constant surveillance, paranoia and pattern recognition), but now more than ever mixed with everyday elements such as Google and Echelon, and with the usual wonderful metaphores, such as the ‘soul delay’, as Pollard defines the time needed by the spirit to align with the body. The only possibility of reading the book, before being able to find it on the Net, is buying at a higher price the rare ‘advance copies’, that is, the not-yet-final drafts, which were passed to the distributors and are now being put on Ebay for auction
