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.
NTT Publishing Co., ISBN 4757170270 Summarize fifteen years of (new) media art is not a simple task, nor for the design of an exhibition, néonnicomprensive for the preparation of a text. Discarding overarching ambitions and pretensions of absolute objectivity, remains a serious investigative work and a daunting task of selection. To tempt him were Fumihiko Sumitomo and Yukiko Shikata for InterCommunication Center in Tokyo, elaborating a structured itinerary on the radical evolution of electronic art since 1989, the year in which the portents of a dramatic change in culture and society have made strongest. What is, then it is one of the many possible paths, historical context and from an event from a static print publication, characterized by five keywords chosen to represent the phenomenon (Time, Space, Body, Public, Generative) and a parallel history in which technology, theory, works and art exhibitions run parallel. Even these, on the whole, may be as many interpretations of media art, created through the evolution of technical capabilities, or the birth of periodic innovative thesis, or with the ideas concrete form in his works egregious, or, finally, with the concepts cross systematized by the most significant exhibitions. In each of these cultural journeys are outlined some of the characteristics of the phenomenon and others will remain in the shadows, focusing on a specific reading and sometimes even sector, but always interconnected with other areas. And it is in this that the inclusion of any link with the past, it is essential to ward off self-referentiality which, although inherent to the technology, is to break down the last barrier to lead the electronic culture in the wider contemporary.
