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.
Anger is part of human nature and although it can have useful and adaptive purposes for the individual, it is also considered a negative emotion. In any case, in the event that uncontrolled anger takes over, it can easily turn →
I’m never at ease in a crowd… I often end up observing people as if they were “other” from me and I often get lost in trying to quantify and shape the thoughts of the people around me. Every time →
As far back as 1600, the word computer meant someone who does calculations. Someone, not something … that something in fact, had yet to be invented. Today, we all know that calculations are the basis of any trivial operation made →
Dream expert G. William Domhoff, a distinguished professor and psychology researcher at UC Santa Cruz, has spent decades studying dreams and their meaning. Over the years he has shifted his attention from understanding dreams to understanding the conditions and parts →
The elderly Viv notices our presence and invites us to sit in her kitchen, right there in front of her, where she can see us. Thus began the interactive video experience “The Visit“, born from the collaboration of the artist →
Although the Swiss landscapes are known throughout the world for their uncontaminated beauty, in reality they are supported by artificial infrastructures that have shaped these natural environments for decades: dams, tunnels, protection nets, irrigation systems, snow cannons and many other →
Similar to what Philip Dick told us in 1956, in Minority Report, our ‘smart cities’ are now trying to become “safe cities”. There are a lot of IT companies already working with the various military forces, creating mapping systems that →
The world has changed many times along with its inhabitants. Inhabitants who are a bit ungrateful, if we look at ourselves in the mirror. We have evolved, built, destroyed and … polluted, polluted a lot. We even polluted while cleaning: →
Cameras, recognition software, walls, borders … we are growing more and more accustomed to sacrificing humanity and privacy in the name of some sort of promised security, or even for much less. The ideological and practical boundaries between what is →
Philosophy, mythology, fantasy and ancient cultures from around the world are steeped in stories and figures that are often similar to one other. The creator Demiurge is certainly one of these: from the God Eru Ilúvatar and the Ainur born →
