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.
Propose an ironic vision of a past that little bit of fashion is one of the opportunities of computer games which have the undoubted ability to recreate historical systems through simulation that brings back what the fury of the mass media erases information in no you know it. Unterzögersdorf Soviet- inpronunciabile is the title of a video game activist group-tecnofilosofi Austrian Monochrom. Unterzögersdorf is the latest satellite state of the Soviet bloc, a tiny country nestled in the Austrian territory still loyal to the theory and practice of socialism. Playing as the party secretary Vladislav player must defend the scarce supplies and reject the western cultural invasion in the form of bands of young metalheads. After a disturbing introduction you find yourself in an adventure game in style Lucasarts: according to the authors, "it was clear that a game genre practically extinct as the graphic adventure would be the best way to communicate the concept of Soviet -Unterzögersdorf. " In fact, the retro and decadent atmosphere permeates every screen, dialogues and monologues are only in Russian (with English subtitles), the musical score, made up of pompous anthems of the regime is to spread via local radio. Everywhere, the bleakness and desolation of an economy in shambles. The humor is as ruthless you can imagine, Comrade Vladislav never misses the chance to unleash his fierce rhetoric, singing the praises of his beloved homeland, quoting from memory parts of the capital and maneuvering perfectly absurd bureaucratic system of the village. The postmodern pastiche improbable Soviet computer is irresistible, and you will have to deal with, for example, a cumbersome machinery for virtual reality fueled by plutonium, the mysterious "machine without God", and more. With a soundtrack that includes Negativland and Jazz Dance Combinat, Soviet-Unterzögersdorf is a must play, but it is only the first chapter of a trilogy still to be completed, and even if completely free to download, accepts donations via PayPal to develop the rest . The game (for Windows and Linux) in Russian with subtitles in English and German is licensed under Creative Commons.
