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.
ZRC Publishing / Revolver, ISBN 3937577408 Marina Grzinic, artist and theorist of media, is among the leading expert in the peculiar evolution of the media in art and in society in the territories of the former 'Eastern Europe' This collection of essays is an important compendium of polished analysis of the practices that have gone through in the last fifteen years these places. A 'location' that, in fact, took over borders liquid grafting characteristics of territories liquid assets, in turn, for their unique historical moment. One of the consequences of the swoop of the media in these territories was the radical redefinition of the terms of time (the collapse of the Eastern bloc, with a different scan of living between the before and after) and the collapse of space (through the creation and social diffusion of cyberspace, wittily known as the author). The media and artistic movements that have crossed them have played a unique role during historical moments, such as several national television stations during the bloody civil war of the former Yugoslavia, the territory in which it was set on the sensational fake Darko Maver of 0100101110101101.ORG , as well as the critical role played cultural NSK in Slovenia or the background on which it has developed the uncertain identity of Netochka Nezvanova. The transformation, therefore, the previous cultural isolation in a lively curiosity about the outside world and a critical ability to rework their past, along with the re-appropriation of technologies, has been a significant strength. Artistic practices, here, have never prescisso from a specific critical consciousness, while the analysis of their intentions and their effects outlines a scenario from the past precious value, witnessing definitely as an important piece of the future of media art is born and raised the east.
