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.
designed cover + download code – panke.gallery
Shush Tones’ package is a 12” traditional paperboard in a limited edition of 100 copies. It’s nothing really special at first sight, but actually inside the paper box there is a plexiglass square sheet with a code number to download the work on the plexiglass surface. According to the goals of the collective panke.gallery, this design empathizes an aspect: it’s still a digital collection item, so it’s an art work. At the same time, the collective doesn’t ignore to chance to spread the main contents of the work, which are full of contemporary creativity and are meticulously organized by Claire Tolan. Digital activism, net art and club culture are the focus of the electronic crew, who thinks of these editions as a way to support the artists and the continuous gallery projects. For this edition Claire Tolan produced new exclusive sets of SUSH Tones, a system of sounds and phone tunes for iOS and Android. These sets take the name of SHUSH Basilisk, Truth To SHUSH, Bayesian SHUSH, Rare Earth Tones, SHUSH Vuln and SHUSH Yoke. In the construction of technological imaginary worlds, there is a reference to complex systems, to a reformatted collective awareness and to communication on a planetary scale. Mobile phones, always more omnipresent and pervasive in our daily life, become the perfect tool for these experiments. Phone sounds “dramatize” our days and stimulate different and unconventional suggestions. Phone tunes have long been used to create customer loyalty for a brand or to highlight the attachment to some cultural memes. Here they get a critical reinterpretation, in relation to the mass culture and the under-categorised space of the alarm systems. Some tunes are created for specific announcements, others are vague, inspired by an abstract and evocative “narration.” SHUSH wants to remodel our perception: we don’t know if this can really happen, but here any message seems insinuating, any notice is meditative, a little drop of synthetic estrangement in an ocean of words too often trivially conformed.
