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.
Blind Landing is an interactive installation by the artist Jooyoung Oh. It is composed of a helmet that tracks brain waves and eye movements, and artificial intelligence software that analyzes the forms of the video frames. When the helmet is →
Measuring phenomena, making them readable in the form of numbers, producing data, creating models to guide future choices, is a feverish process around us. We let ourselves be guided by devices programmed by others to make choices, modulate behaviors, take →
Soon, human manual labour may no longer be necessary. Perhaps machines, thanks to the development of artificial intelligence, will perform even intellectual work. The Institute of Human Obsolescence critically explores this scenario: how can we reinvent the role of humans →
“We cannot talk about responsible data without talking about the moment when data becomes data”. This is the starting point of the research by Mimi Onuoha, an artist who explores the processes by which people are measured, abstracted, represented and →
In front of 154/156 rue d’Aubervilliers in Paris, the artist Pascal Boyart has created a mural that represents a reinterpretation of the famous painting by Delacroix “La liberté guidant le peuple”. The architecture of the image faithfully reflects the original →
Narciss is a piece of software made with basic artificial intelligence techniques built to analyse itself. The installation, by Waltz Binaire Studio, consists of a computer equipped with a camera in front of a circular mirror. The algorithm translates the →
In the “Data Shop” installation, lots of colored tin cans are placed on shelves, similar to those normally used in supermarkets, perfectly ordered by colour in columns, as if they were encased in a structured matrix. The graphics on the →
There are many photographic artistic devices, built in recent years to critically analyse the intromission of new technologies in the photographic aesthetic process. Prosthetic Photographer is one of these: thanks to machine learning training this device learns to recognise pictures →
A 1950s-style Bakelite telephone is the core of the installation by Stephanie Cormier and Dave Dyment for Untitled [Eavesdrop]. However, the strong retro aesthetic of the work conceals a conceptual technological short-circuit. Inside the device there is a smartphone that →
“Why did I leave social media?” French artist Thierry Fournier presents a 32 minute video series of people who have spontaneously decided to abandon or disable their accounts on Facebook, Instagram, or Snapchat as they are too harmful and evil →
