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.
Is in progress at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco Bang the Machine: Computer Gaming Art and Artifacts , an exhibition that confirms the growing interest in the world of art in the culture of video games. Produced in collaboration with the Stanford Humanities Laboratory consists of three different sections that deal with the world of non-commercial production of video games from different aspects. Game Scenes, greater exposure, including SimGallery Katherine Isbister and Rainey Straus, PainStation the Fur, RGB Project by Mauro Ceolin, 'Screenshots' John Haddock, reproductions of moments of contemporary history through isometric typical screens of electronic games, prints linear spaces with distortion curve Shirley Shor, a selection of videos machinima , the reconstruction of the Waco tragedy of C-level, '600 Polygon John Carmack 'a sculpture of velebre programmer Quake made with the same aesthetic of the game,' Carpet Invaders' Janek Simon, the Caucasian rug on which is projected Space Invaders, with original designs are very similar to those of the famous game, 'Budaechigae' Sunny Kim and Paul Johnson, a collaborative game in which avatars of two artists relate in an evolutionary manner as time goes on, the altered 3D characters of Jason Weiner. Game Commons, however, is a section developed through an extensive project Kingdom of Piracy , with three new works by as many artists (Eastwood Real Time Strategy Group, LogicalAnd / re-p.org and portable [k] ommunity), which celebrate the ethics of this open communication platform, curated by Shu Lea Cheang, Armin Medosch and Yukiko Shikata, which promotes the appropriation of the means to express the importance of the common areas and shared in order to have a significant political development of society Information. Playshop, finally, is the space of the workshop organized by Amy Franceschini Futurefarmers, with measures of the same Fur and Jonah Brucker-Cohen, 'Fingerprint Maze', an interface to transform the fingerprints 3D mazes, as well as seminars on wireless and the Processing language. The same organizer with Richard Mortimer present a series of chemically gameboy powered by energy from a network of lemon trees.
