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 
27.03.02 Variable Media Network, preserving the art of new media.
The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science, and Technology have signed an agreement of partnership for 2002 in order to develop the Variable Media Network, a consortium of cultural institutions dedicated to the creation and sharing of methods for the preservation of ' new media art. Two project directors Alain Depocas, head of Langlois' Centre for Research and Documentation, and Jon Ippolito, (pictured) Associate Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim. The concept of Variable Media, in fact, has been developed by the latter, to preserve the works acquired over time by inadequate documentation and technical obsolescence. The program wants them to be the same artists to imagine ways of circumventing technical oblivion that distinguishes the forms of art technology, trying to describe their work in a form independent of the means used, so that they can be translated in the new media available when the current will be considered too old. The project also includes the formation of a charge for this type of problem, which is Caitlin Jones, already taken to the Guggenheim to begin to study concrete cases. Another important objective is the opening to other interested institutions involving more artists and developed according to the principles of open source, a database of individual experiences and how the artists themselves would like that their work can vary over time, thus creating standard open ready to be shared by the various institutions. During the year, the site will be launched Variablemedia.net, with developments and updates of the project.
