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.
Facial Noise, a performance artwork created by Noa Dolberg, performed by Azumi Oe, and with sound design by Khen Price, uses data from facial expressions to manipulate real-time generated sound. Using FaceOSC, a facial tracking software made by Kyle McDonald →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816692132, English, 304 pages, 2014, USA
“Radical” would be the most appropriate category for the French philosopher François Laruelle’s work, centred on his concept of “Non-Philosophy.” Here Galloway extensively engages in Laruelle’s work, elucidating it →
CD- LOM
These are essentially field recordings taken from ventilation systems inaccessible to the public in a soviet-era market – Tržnica na Trnavskom Mýte – in Bratislava. Selected by Jonáš Gruska, they have been divided into ten different tracks for →
The “maker” movement has gained widespread popularity, especially for its innovations in the local manufacturing and home printing of durable objects. The imaginary triggered by the 3D printer seems to go hand in hand with a fascination for generating physical →
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 →
Daily Paywall, Paolo Cirio’s latest work, is based on thousands of articles literally stolen from economic online newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and The Economist. The (political) script developed by the artist is capable of scraping texts →
CD – Farmacia901
The three digital compositions that constitute this project are the result of an exhaustive “recycling”, rather than remixing. Author Asmus Tietchens questions the necessity of creating original music when “digital and analogue tools allow us to derive →
Today there’s a growing “machine audience” nurtured by projects that interpret data and use it to feed other systems (such as Google Books feeding Google Corpus for their online services). “Novice Art Blogger” by Matthew Plummer Fernandez joins this scene, →
CD – LINE
NHK is a collaborative project initiated in 2006 by Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro, Japanese artists who live and work in Osaka. Matsunaga operates under several different pseudonyms such as NHK’Koyxen, NHKyx, Internet Magic and Koyxen, while →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262027489, English, 320 pages, 2014, USA
How much has the concept of the cloud-based ‘app’ socially and economically changed our daily lives, and how much critical thinking has been produced about that? Surprisingly, The Imaginary App →
