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.
cassette – Les Intérêts Spécifiques
Financial trading and affairs permeate all parts of society, influencing every area of human relations through schemes, tactics, and often criminal strategies. There are approximately 12,000 billion dollars hidden in tax havens, claim RYBN, a collective of artists based in Paris who have been active for nearly 20 years in documenting and denouncing criminal forms of entrepreneurship and business. The financial virus requires immunity to proliferate and this comes from the liminal extra territories, the so-called offshore zones – hidden capital is permanently moving, bypassing every rule and dominating all it encounters. ‘If money is the bond that unites me to human life, that unites me to society, that connects me with nature and men’, Marx asked, ‘isn’t money perhaps the bond of all bonds? Can it not dissolve and tighten every bond? And so, isn’t it also the universal dissolver?’. These are essentially the themes covered in this audio narration which was first used as the soundtrack to the exhibition of the same name, held at the contemporary art center Les Tanneries in Amilly, in the Centre-Loire Valley region, an event which also gave rise to an extraordinary anthology of texts merged into a book divided into five sections: Offshore Governance, Speculative Practices, Art Market, Liquid Identities and New Spaces. The multidisciplinary approach of the collective seems to infuse every media they encounter and in this case, it is the voice of JF Blanquet that holds the scene with its neutral, peremptory cadence, effective in listing the financial glossary of these activists through a long enumeration of issues and action plans, strictly divided from A (for abuse) to F (for falsification) on the first side and from F (for fraud) to Z (as in free zone) on the second, for a combined total of 42 minutes. The proposed list functions as a historical memory of the autonomisation of capital in an era of its maximum development, the blind power of a virtual world that now invades everyday life. Having reached a point of no return through financial flows, we are all globally interconnected – thanks to the work of RYBN we are compelled to consider the consequences of this interconnectivity.
RYBN – The Great Offshore
RYBN – The Great Offshore
