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.
Raster-Noton, ASIN: 3981276035, English, 400 pages, 2017, Germany
The oldest digital culture institutions which are still active, are involved with different options to celebrate their multiple-decades anniversaries. One specific element is usually very present in all these options: a celebration of their memory, or what has been produced over the years, the “archive”, embodied then in various forms. The seminal label Raster-Noton is, in this same condition, celebrating twenty years of activity, and they have opted for a classic printed publication, but in their own tradition. It’s a limited edition heavy hardback book of four hundred pages in a cardboard slipcase. It starts with a preface by Olaf Bender, followed by an interview by Max Dax with him and Carsten Nicolai. What follows is the complete catalogue, where every single release between 1996 and 2016 is documented in spreads, ending with a detailed listing of release formats and information on products simply distributed or curated. Raster-Noton defines itself as a “platform” for its artists and Bender says that it was founded “to achieve artistic self-determination”. These qualities can be clearly perceived by browsing the almost two hundred releases and their design. Also the book design is consistent with their ethos: constructed in a modular way, that potentially allows the reader to take pages off or to add them, updating it over time. Music is also present, but in a fixed format, through the attached compilation “Archiv 4” with tracks (among others) from Alva Noto, Byetone, Frank Bretschneider, Kyoka, Robert Lippok and Uneo Masaaki.
