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.
Inaugurated on March 20 Making Things Public a mammoth exhibition organized by the ZKM in Karlsruhe and curated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Focused on the representation of politics by the spirit of art and science, it attempts the ambitious task of re-contextualize the visitor / citizen in the complex contemporary reality, outlining the places, real and abstract of the policy itself and contributing to the conscience of all their actions 'public'. Certainly the public dimension of contemporary art was greatly expanded by the pervasiveness of the media and their mirror ever wider and following the personal dimension and everyday. The 'atmosphere of democracy' is what this exhibition seeks, from crystallisation past and of other cultures, to the controversies of today, in a quest that takes away deliberately policy professional to focus on models that have managed to gain public recognition through a balanced mix of technologies, partnerships, interfaces, platforms, media and interpersonal lattice models. Divided in 13 thematic areas, the exhibition runs through different collecting dozens of works ranging up to eight centuries ago. Among the most recent are: 'Communiculture' of Futurefarmers , a community that communicates themes represented by as many custom avatars from their users, ' One Trees 'by Natalie Jeremijenko,' JJ 'a client for Carnivore developed by Golan Levin that associates alert levels of the control software to as many facial expressions, 'A Synoptic Outline', another mapping of the Bureau d'Etudes , and 'Issue Crawler' by Richard Rogers and Noortje Marres, an extension of the broader project Govcom . org . A specific web project finally was given to Steve Dietz, entitling Fair Assembly and consists of an open database where you try to play the mechanism Meeting for discussion and decision-making through the representation of multiplicity, ie implementing a participatory platform where anyone may propose a web project or software that has to do with the themes of the exhibition, making part later.
