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.
m&m paper, ISBN 978-8797491508, English, 240 pages, 2023, Denmark
This is the monograph of Danish artist Mogens Jacobsen, who has explored art using a wide variety of media since the early 2000s. The concept of ‘apparatus’, mainly in Flusser’s formulation, syntheses Jacobsen’s practice very well, and in the first essay Katja Kwastek outlines a comprehensive theoretical path with which to contextualise it. Several curators and theorists provide elaborate and analytical essays on specific artworks (Morten Søndergaard, Jonas Fritsch, Adam Bencard, Christopher Gad, Jacob Lillemose, Lev Manovich, Louise Whiteley and Morten Rosenmeier), shedding a new light on their respective documentation, which can be easily consulted within the nearby pages. The critical aspects of every project, such as the care for the production, and the skill to seamlessly work with bacteria as opposed to electrical, digital or analogue components, renders a small galaxy of unique ‘systems’. Furthermore, the artist has also chosen to document his own unique research process behind quite a few of these projects, publishing the crucial sources, along with occasional insights into some of the in-between schemes. This rich catalogue of works uses a number of high-quality photographs, and various types of papers, and inserts, along with a detailed design that can be enjoyed with a limited edition of 200 numbered and signed copies.
