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.
Digital Aesthetics Research Center, University of Aarhus, ISBN 87988444040 The pervasive presence of the software in everything we use daily, did not involve the same capillary diffusion of a culture of software, expanded and evolved. But the same culture, translated into the awareness of the enormous possibilities of the code, crystallized in the Conventions and in the nascent theories about the software is slowly permeating areas of research and analysis of contemporary life. To trace its history over the past three years has been before the festival READ_ME, and then the resulting online archive Runme.org, chock full of programs that embody the elusive concept of 'software art'. This book is the catalog of the 2004 edition of the READ_ME, a tome of four hundred pages that collects all the many papers presented and thirty reviews of the latest designs. The compendium of interventions explores very different branches of the analysis made in the importance of the software, and its imaginary, intended as processing levels of reality. "The software is a 'mysterious process'" is the definition of Casey Reas, which refers to the characteristics of 'language' of the code and to its enormous potential generative. But this is only one aspect of the culture of software, ranging from the social role of the interfaces, the linguistic conventions attributed to the different actors of the interaction (such as the role of the user'' '), the abstraction of the same concept of software as a cultural construct that draws a dynamic infrastructure but decisive for its contents. Moreover, the same social dynamics that is capable of triggering in its production (sharing, hacking, mutual support) make the software a humus conceptual always ready to welcome its enthusiastic and savvy manipulators. It is precisely this dual level of analysis (the theoretical research done in academia and the least mediated but as effective as the programmers and practitioners) that emerges from the content of the text, made in dealing dialectically significant part of the invisible world around us
