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.
The game (T) ERROR Robert Praxmarer is much more than just a game console, it is an opportunity to take direct action. There are so many ways of being activist, constructive and destructive: definitely (T) ERROR →
The classified ad subculture, born first in free ad magazines, then in every other place, Internet included, is a medium on its own, which, in a few lines, tries to synthesize a message of request →
Despite all efforts to churn out a marketing politically correct and wring an eye to the music industry and another to users and their comfort, even the refined products Apple does not escape out to a →
If the performance of the vj are often characterized by sequencing of loops according to an impromptu personal aesthetic, without any contextualization that goes beyond the continuous movement of forms and the special effect, there are →
A pinch of irony is often necessary when it comes to videogames having sex as their main theme. The possibility to make up new realities at will should encourage to simulate new situations and to →
V2_/NAi Publishers, ISBN 9056623885
The meanings of media communication and the relations between them are one of the most important aspects of contemporary world. The interpretation of present times can’t ignore the relation between →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262025450
Explaining the fanciful title of this essay, the authors state that “any digital artifact is half transparent and half reflective”, alternating between these two states according to the →
The addition of electronic features of acoustic instruments allows you to develop the ability to exponentially sound production and make it more thrifty control on the instrument itself. Metasaxophone Project by Matthew Burtner is a project →
The collaborative dimension of the web allows you to coordinate data collection efforts and subsequent public communication difficult to achieve without these technologies, putting in the hands of citizens valuable opportunities to understanding the reality. From →
When Steve Kurtz of the Critical Art Ensemble, called 911 (the 113 American), had already seen the death of his wife in his sleep of a heart attack. In the terrible tragedy that had just invested, →
