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 
21:12:02 VideA_02, no_profit vj culture in Barcelona.
Barcelona confirms "capital" of creation and electronic media in the wake of the effervescent audiovisual scene that characterizes it, fueled by international events, the first of Sonar, gives rise to new exhibition platforms. In this context arises VIDEA , festival of audiovisual and new technologies that takes place over two days, 20 and 21 December, at the seventeenth-century Cupula de Venus (and then moved during the hours owls in a "secret place"). Now in its third edition, VIDEA is one of the few festivals devoted exclusively to the emerging A / V cultures. Created in the formula no_sponsor_no_profit, is the brainchild of Telenoika, a cultural association in Barcelona that is inspired by the concept, developed by Roy Ascott, of telenoia. The telenoia replaces the telematic culture of paranoia individualistic society. The vjing presented (Slidemedia, Rotok, Videotone, violence-electric +) is mainly based on a performative interaction between vj and dj: a report audio video created at the very moment of execution live, similar to the agreement between musicians with different instruments, and basically governed by the rhythmic patterns and practices of sampling, repetition and loops. However, the festival has other interesting aspects. Among the holdings in fact there are, for example fiftyfifty Mia Makela and Pedro Soler, a collective that aims to explore and disseminate the limits of digital creation. And Pedro Soler was one of the commissioners of the program Softarama of Sonarama, the most innovative of the last section Sonar. In addition, the program includes videa video projection of social and political criticism (guerrilla news network, indimedia.org) with particular attention to the voices from Latin America (Honduras, Argentina). Noteworthy was the participation of two emerging names in the landscape of video art and audiovisual experimentation Italian: Elastic Romans, who have three video installations, and the Milanese Otolab, which lead to the VIDEA "quartetto.swf, the techno-visual concert for four laptops winner Live the Italian media Contest.
Lavinia Garulli
