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.
Organized by the team of Radioqualia and the Institute for Contemporary Art at the Lounge Bar at Jo'Burg of Cape Town (South Africa), <re:Play> is an exhibition of 'critical games', ie of video games made by artists who decontextualize actors and actions, thus subverting the usual rules of opposition. The program includes workshops and lectures of the invited artists and curators to explain concepts and techniques in the development of games with a strong political content. There are six papers included, reflecting different approaches but with the common goal of reinterpreting a medium perceived through the standards of violence and stereotypes induced by major industry sector. 'Space Invaders Act 1732' Andy Deck and 'Blacklash' Mongrel, for example, are two significant examples lo-tech that several years ago they changed the predestined 'enemies' negative symbols in real life, subverting the classic combination of aliens bad / good land presented by their official titles to which they are inspired. Equally striking are the social principles found in other accomplishments, all playable via the web and plug-ins appropriate: 'Escape from Woomera' dell'escapefromwoomera collective, the game is 'first person' in 3d in which the protagonist is a refugee who must be able to escape from the homonymous Australian detention center. More nuanced intentions of ' The Intruder 'by Natalie Bookchin, in which to enter the narrative of a piece by Borges, the player must deal with a series of classic game, transforming its role from passive to active. A simulation unconventional instead is the basis of the last two works: 'Antiwargame' Josh On + Futurefarmers, in which the protagonist must lead the government of the United States in the war against terrorism, with sarcastic consequences of bad decisions, and ' NationStates' by Max Barry, a sort of SimCity expanded to an entire nation with the full freedom to take care of their own subjects or oppress them irreparably, experimenting with different control policies through the constant monitoring of the cultural and economic conditions. Are you good deals, therefore, all be experienced online, to be involved in a new narrative of the game, changed artistically and politically contextualized.
