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.
When Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble, called 911 (the 113 American), had already seen the death of his wife in his sleep of a heart attack. In the terrible tragedy that had just invested, never would have thought of encountering bureaucratic idiocy police and federal agents before then. These in fact in front of his equipment Biochemical immediately raised their shields against a non-existent bioterrorism, holding in custody for 24 hours, subjecting to seizure of his home and all his equipment, including the equipment last project 'Free Range Grains', consisting of a mobile laboratory that allows to extract the DNA of an organism, useful for testing to certify a possible edible transgenic contamination. Kurtz, associate professor of the Department of Art at the University of New York at Buffalo is a member of the Critical Art Ensemble, one of the artistic collectives with thicker critical technology for more than ten years. Lately the EWC focused on biotechnology and their unspoken technological and economic evolution with projects such as Biohazard and the book 'Molecular Invasion' (reviewed in the interview to the group 'Fuzzy Biological Sabotage' on Neural 20 ). Newly arrived other subpoenas, as well as that for the same Kurtz, and concern Beatriz da Costa, Dorian Burr and Steve Barnes (other members of the EWC), Andrew Johnson and Paul Vanouse, other professors of Buffalo where he collaborated Vanouse in the past with the group and Adel Henderson, director of the Art Department. All measures were made in the name of the infamous Patriot Act and its extensions to biological weapons, and is scheduled for June 15, the first hearing of the case. The reasons of the survey are totally absurd view of the public and declared the group's activities and portend a persecution that seems to be much more political and premeditated that made in defense of the state. At the moment what the legal front (CAE Defense Fund) coalizzatosi around Kurtz and his tragedy calls for voluntary contributions are necessary for the sustenance of the substantial legal costs (including minimum and pourable well as through PayPal) and letters of support to make the necessary pressure with the authorities, including a generic has already been written by Eric Kluitenberg (De Balie) and Amanda McDonald Crowley (ISEA)
