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.
576 pages,
The MIT Press
, 2011,
English,
ISBN: 978-0262515818
In the history of media art, Zagreb has definitively been on the map since the very beginning. In 1961 there was a seminal movement called “New Tendencies”, which officially started with a pioneering exhibition curated by Matko Mestrovic at the Museum of Contemporary Art. This international group of (self-defined) researchers were investigating how emerging computer technologies could be used to create different forms of art. Their investigations, ahead of their time, dealt with kinetic, abstract, programmed and conceptual art (which lead to the flourishing of computer art elsewhere) in the distinctive cultural environment of cold war Yugoslavia. This large group coalesced, producing artworks, exhibitions, symposium, catalogues and the historical Bit International magazine (written primarily in Serbo-Croatian, English, French, and German), remaining active until 1978. This hefty book is, in ZKM/Mit press tradition, the “exploded” catalogue of a big exhibition held at ZKM in 2008 (the project was initiated by Darko Fritz). It’s an encyclopedic systematization of the movement’s heritage and includes a large number of documents, original photographs and texts. The excited, active participation seen at the time is enlightening, especially when the technological limits they had to face are considered. Their “art as visual research” motto produced works and debates which can now be seen as a collection of ideas worthy of further study and eventual revamping.
