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.
sonosheet, USB card + booklets – éditions ésam Caen / Cherbourg
On removing an elegant USB card with some beautiful prints on a pearl background from an envelope with the “THE LISTENER” printed on the seal, we transfer the 23 minute file to our computer. The envelope in turn was inside a cardboard box that includes two small but hefty leaflets and a poster featuring a manifesto-style text with the enigmatic title: “To Rock the Boat Head First – In Praise of Research”. That’s not all: there is also a folder and two pages of colorful photos, a flexi disc and a larger square booklet. From the beginning, what we hear are natural sounds captured and edited by Jana Winderen, some birdsong and a constant background noise that could be water flowing. The project was made possible by contributions from the Agence de l’eau Seine Normandie and the Ambassade Royale de Norvège de France Norsk Kultrurråd, as part of the research project REPPAVAL. This focuses on the concept of second nature, meaning how nature and renaturation interact. The representations of landscape and nature and the work of ecological restoration are at the same time the subject of the research and the result of ongoing mutations. Here, it’s possible to say that nature is actually not natural at all. More or less, this is the same in all the rural areas of the old continent, the sum of several factors and human activities, mostly with a productive sense more than some aestheticized rural vision. If the visual act is not simply a passive registration of the external physical environment, here there are many elements which define new scenarios. Theories, sounds, images: the contents are provided by the journalist and photographer Agnès Villette, the artist and publisher Thierry Weyd and the researcher Camille Prunet. There is a premonition of a discipline focusing on the relationship between man and environment where only technical models and procedures hang over everything, but this is not that case. Here we can find aesthetic approaches and all the charms from Dark Ecology by Timothy Morton, the vision of a future coexistence between man and nature.
