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.
The search engines have entered strongly into our lives and in our imagination. Through the use of these valuable tools we can in fact jump from question to another, seemingly without any effort. This all-pervasive presence of Google and his younger brothers favored in recent years, the emergence of numerous research projects (as well as artistic tout court), including a mention apart is worth GoogleBrowser , made by the French company TouchGraph in collaboration with Germany's Martin Spernau. It is a Java applet that is launched on the most popular search engine in order to see all the sites "related" (ie sites with similar content) than the site the subject of our research. For those who dwelt at least once to see how a search engine sees the Web, GoogleBrowser is definitely the best answer, the graph that the application generates in response to our input is extraordinary in view abstraction which is the network of links between the site of our research and its "neighbors." An important concept, however, is that GoogleBrowser displays not only the sites that link to each other to each other through links, but also (indeed especially) sites that are united by the same content, or sites that are characterized by an affinity semantics. Once you set an initial site as the object of our research, GoogleBrowser goes to find the top 10 sites that show an identity of content, then (for each of our double-click) displays the first 10 related to each of the sites resulting from the first research and so on (up to a maximum of 110 nodes). These characteristics have led to the successful implementation especially among bloggers, who make use of blogs aimed at identifying similar content compared to their own, but in reality you can use GoogleBrowser also to discover unsuspected "relatives" on our site .
