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.
Goethe-Institut Krakow, ISBN: 6788393500360, English, 168 pages, 2014, Poland
Germany seems to be the place of choice for Game Art, with a number of resident artists, collectives and theorists producing a remarkable body of work. “Play Instinct! / Spieltrieb!” is a touring project reflecting this wealth of material. Run by the Goethe-Institut, it includes events, exhibitions and performances, organised not as mere artists’ showcases, but as a collection of ideas systematically engaging the local audience. In this catalogue there are theoretical texts (among them an essay by Mathias Fuchs), interviews with selected artists’ groups, but also maps and instructions for urban games. A few established Game Art collectives are also included. “Machina eX”, for example, play computer games in real life environments, in their theatrical “Blind Variation #3” and “Crypt [A]”. There’s also the urban gaming collective “Invisible Playground,” with projects like the “Utopia Stock Exchange,” “You Are GO!,” and “Fables for Drones.” The book also features what is probably the emblematic group of this field, the artist duo “//////////fur////“, who, beyond their famous PainStation, have developed a variety of controversial projects, some embodying a unique playful “interface of pain.” This is celebrated with their first retrospective in the first edition of this project. The hardcover catalogue itself sports a special design: a classic PAC-MAN maze is printed on the cover, capped by a corresponding closed plastic maze and a small electronic toy that, when activated, starts to move frantically within it until physically stopped.
