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.
Onomatopee, ISBN: 9789078454878, 192 pages, 2012, English
The death of books and physical print has been anticipated for some time – as digital mediums take ever-increasing bites from all areas of media with online publishing and archiving, digital libraries, and electronic media readers accelerating the transition from ink and paper to LCD screens. It’s sometimes easy to forget that the modes and materials of media publishing have always been transforming in accordance with the technological, political and cultural movements of the time. In Post-Digital Print the author investigates the intriguing historical relationship between paper and pixel, their similarities and their differences, exploring the strategic use of print by avant-garde culture and experimental literary movements. The book reminds us that the telegraph, telephone, gramophone and radio have all threatened to supplant print – and unsuccessfully! More so, some of the speculative machines of the Victorian age have actually predicted the invention of e-books and reading devices so commonly in use today. The book, the result of a three-year fellowship at the Willem De Kooning Academy, explores the past to hatch a trajectory of future predictions such as the probable rise in remote printing and networked collaborative distribution. Ludovico is asking big questions in this context – what are the social implication of these new post-digital modes of distribution? To him “One of the strongest values of publishing is to develop content that can serve a community and preserve its values, intellectual elaborations and history”. Is the death of print still a pertinent question? Ludovico feels that this question might be a moot one, perhaps ideological, and insists that there is a ‘false opposition’ between pixel and ink. We should, instead, explore how traditional print and digital publishing can augment each other using hybrid strategies. This dynamic symbiosis might be explored by the recent rise of DIY zines or print-on-demand editions – both utilise digital technologies to generate and distribute physical objects. Ludovico has seen the online publishing phenomena unfold completely in the last two decades, together with his experience in editing Neural magazine. He tells this fascinating story in a richly illustrated, highly readable and enjoyable book.
Paul Prudence
