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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27.03.03 Version 3, Technotopia vs. Technopocalypse.
After last year’s edition, dedicated, with a fair amount of forethought, to the ‘digital commons’, the digital art festival named ‘Version – Technotopia vs. Technopocalypse, exploring the multitudes of technology / activism / arts and culture’ opens on March 26 at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Keeping the same radical spirit which marked the first edition, it will once again discuss themes and techniques regarding activism and the creation of art. Among the debates there will be ‘The Future History of Biotech’, which will start from a hypothesis on a future ridden with fatal illnesses caused by genetically modified food, Paul Davies’ suggestion to reuse computers as old as 486s and more, now doomed to obsolescence or to become a source of pollution, for controlling interactive sculptures and conferences on ‘tactical media’ supervised by Geert Lovink, Vacuum Cleaner and Joanne Richardson of the Subsol project. The schedule of the film shows features ‘Eye of the Storm’, a short films programme by Indymedia Argentina, ‘SupaWhite’, digital audio and video clips on racism, class struggles, globalism and popular culture by Paul Lloyd Sargent, the work ‘Horror of Advertising’, by Conglomco.org, an interactive video where TV ads and horror film sequences are mixed in a simulated bloodbath. There will also be a non-stop performance by Office of Fatherland Defence (OFD) and their Total Surveillance project, which will show to the visitors the recordings taken by the surveillance cameras installed in the halls. A considerable space will be dedicated to lowtech 8-bit culture, with Carbon Defense League offering their experience on musical reprogramming of Gameboys, Beige’s worshop on Nintendo cartridges hacking techniques and the 2003 Cassette Jockeys (audio cassette DJs) world championship, also organized by Beige. Finally, a DVD containing a collection of independent videos and a music compilation will be presented, and the visitors will be encouraged to copy and share them freely!
