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 
30.11.01 Life 4.0.
The jury of Life 4.0 , formed by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, Sally Jane Norman, Daniel Canogar, Machiko Kusahara and Nell Tenhaaf, and announced plans to its three winners. The competition is responsible for works that use concepts and techniques of 'artificial life'. The first prize went to a dead heat two jobs. One is' Electric Sheep ', (pictured) a fascinating screensaver distributed based on the assumption of computers' sleep' collectively on the Internet, is designed in the famous novel Philip K. Dick 'Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep', which was made into 'Blade Runner'. The 'Electric Sheep' represented by 'frattaliche animated flames', are created every 15 minutes and distributed to their clients. The other work that has divided the highest award is the installation 'Remain in Light' Japanese Haruki Nishijima, presented at Ars Electronica this year, in which you collect through the appropriate 'screens' by butterflies with specific sensors, fragments of sounds analog present in the environment, which then go to make up a different interactive visual space. Third place is the work of web art Novus Extinctus the collective Transnational Temps (formed by Andy Deck, Fred Adam and Verónica Perales) in which the authors have compiled a taxonomy of domain names on the web, creating a parallel with the loss of biodiversity in the real world. To the domains entered by the user are matched fictitious domains that reflect the names of endangered species, calling for 'record' before they disappear, all generating the visual code from the site indicated with animations and ascii-art. Between jobs, finally, who received a 'honorary mention', but who are not able to enter in the first three, it should also be reported 'Emerging Relations' of the Italian Mauro Annunziato and Piero Pierucci, a space in which the visitor affects the generation of abstract visual patterns on a screen through the movements of his hands.
