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.
Kicked off on May 17 the exhibition-event Kairos – the virtuality of art and the reality of the images, at the Center of Contemporary Art Piacentini palace of San Benedetto del Tronto. Open until June 22, focuses on the theme of virtuality and how our present communicates through the digital image. Virtuality not as an abstraction, but as a starting point to investigate this in its art forms, cultural and social. Kairòs artists and activists participating in training and heterogeneous areas of expression, united by the desire to experience through digital media, to give the reality of critical views and diverse. The works of video art and digital art in the three floors of the building Piacentini, show that it is possible to use the language of the media to be made aware of the real, learning not to fear the technology and its power, but using it in a free manner. Kairos, the second of three events that have involved and will involve (in September), the historic building in San Benedetto del Tronto, is curated by Tatiana Bazzichelli and Mario Savini. Among the appearances are videos on media activism project AHA: Activism-Hacking-Artivism , made by artists: Federico Bucalossi, Massimo contrast, Mariano Equizzi, GMM – Youngsters Social Mechanics, Tommaso Tozzi, Giacomo Verde and the collective: AvANa. net, Candida TV, Indymedia Italy, Indymedia New York, Neguvon, Fifth Wall Network, Strano Network. These are accompanied by video production group Cut-TV . There is also the project Body-Bodies, 2002, made by students of the Architectural Design Assistant Prof. Antonino Saggio, the Faculty of Architecture "Ludovico Quaroni" of Rome, La Sapienza. These are flanked by the projects of the young video artists of the Multimedia Laboratory of the Academy of Fine Arts in Macerata: Jessica dancers Lionice Cola, Matteo Fato, Nicola Sbrozzi, Valeria Micucci, Andrea Scopetta, Valeria Serino. The exhibition was inaugurated by the performance Venerantj, by the collective of the same name, which organized the recent initiative 72h biomechanical strength of the Amphitheatre Cascine in Florence (25-27 April 2003), built for the occasion a huge Venus Biomechanics .
