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.
Shanghai Zendai Museum of Modern Art If it is fashionable to define China as a new frontier, it is not wrong to think about how the unfettered capitalism which has subjected that his company is looking for international cultural legitimacy. This is also the new media art are included in the policies, such as pride of a nation that wants to make a future projection of his image as created in the Western imagination. This catalog of ElectroScape, International new media art exhibition, which opened the show Zendai Museum of Modern Art in Shanghai, however, defines a curatorial approach that emphasizes the artificial nature. This speaks volumes about the rapid burning of stages that seeks to ferry the rich philosophy and Chinese traditional art to contemporary art, its market and its possible evolutions. In the design of the exhibition, the concepts of Chinese philosophy of time and space are compared with those expressed by the time-based media, in a way which sees local artists in the flickering more interesting, such as acupuncture as an interface of Jing Jiang- Bo or a scale model of the same museum Jeong-Ju Jeong, through which activate surveillance cameras whose images are projected on the back wall commingled with well-known western names (Golan Levin, Christa Sommerer & Laurent Mignonneau, Eduardo Kac, John F . Simon Jr., Miltos Manetas, etc.. etc..). After the first New Media Arts Exhibition and Symposium in Beijing in 2004, this exhibition marks another node bidirectional connection between the art of new media and the new Chinese mainland.
