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.
. Art 
23:10:02 Electrohype 2002 in software art festival in Malmo.
It was inaugurated on October 23 in Malmo (Sweden) Electrohype 2002 , the first two years of computer art in the Scandinavian territories, consisting of a conference on the theme 'Art and software – software as art' and an exhibition of sixteen international artists. The meeting was scheduled to speak 'Coding as Creative Writing' by John F. Simon, Jr., 'environmental code' by Martin Howse, 'Read_me Software Art Festival: Step Beyond Institution' Olga Goriunova, 'Programming Works' group Boredomeresearch and 'software art: the ultimate example of the tension between art and design' the Dutch journalist Josephine Bosma. The exhibition includes works instead of software art from the Baltic States as the 'Sound Room' by Sweden's Rikard Lundstedt, in which to orient themselves in a room should be used for only the sounds, the client Carnivore 'Out of the Ordinary' by Lisa Jevbratt, or 'Easy Listening' Frøysland Gisle of Norway, where a computer keeps trying to interpret the sentences in a coffee producing texts completely misrepresented. Among the works from the rest of the world there are 'Postmodernism Generator' Australian Andrew C. Bulhak, capable of generating texts little sensible in any literary genre, 'System 1.6' by Paul Smith & Vicky Isley (boredomresearch), a self-contained digital system, which in its internal interactions produces a fascinating ladscape sound and visual and, finally, images autocomponenti American John F. Simon, Jr. that appear on LCS display mounted on the wall.
