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 pharmaceutical industry’s advertisement and communication is based on the promise of a physical faintness’ elimination and the consequent general well-being achievement, that seem then to be the most ‘natural’ life condition. This ‘magic’ effect is obtained through obscure organic reaction triggered by the ‘product’ ingestion. Shifting this simple cause/effect mechanism to a metaphorical level Annual Checkup by Lisa Erdman develops a political critique with printed and tv fake advertisements of pharmaceuticals. Combining the lure of finally being healthy and self-confident with the excess of propaganda, she has assembled adv for ‘Abstinen’ (prevention of premarital sexual activity in teens and young adults), ‘Jesurex’ (to treat symptoms of weakening faith or non-existent faith in Jesus Christ), ‘Patriotec’ (to treat symptoms of unpatriotic thoughts and behavior, especially during wartime), ‘Ethnivox’ (medication for racial and ethnic identity transformation), ‘Consumerin’ (effective for the treatment of shopping deficiency, and purchase anxiety) and ‘Homotrol’ (once-a-month tablet for treating homosexuality). The perfect and ‘classic’ graphic layout is screeching against the almost absurd propaganda content, part pessimistic science fiction, part very plausible neo-con normalization. Even if it’s easily taggable in the ‘fake’ domain, this work enhances the actual invasiveness of propaganda and the availability of the general public to swallow anything that would efficiently change their status.
