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.
Created for the Szczecin Philharmonic as part of the MUSIC.DESIGN.FORM Festival, this installation work from the panGenerator collective addresses noise pollution in a different context, offering the public a rather violent sensory experience. Noise sampled from the city’s soundscape is orchestrated →
Ben Grosser has developed a personal narrative to turn the psychological traps of social media upside down, using a universal visual language that targets its core mechanisms. In Stuck in the Scroll, he does this again, revealing in real time →
Delay was integrated as a symbolic element in early net art and is now still very much present, an unnoticed element in streaming. The process of unveiling, with the physicality of the global internet, has already been undertaken by various →
Emotion recognition is a holy grail for the AI industry and has the potential to quantify customer reactions. Hege Tapio has created a dystopian scenario in Ephemeral, which is part of her doctoral thesis. She builds a fictitious company of →
In the many ways that artists interpret their role with science, from becoming the ‘god’ of an ecosystem to decoding invisible signals and symbols of various living entities, Mauricio Lacrampette embraces instead the role of the serious scientist using →
Aurora Mititelu has developed a special digital character for her artworks. His name is Abel and he is the ‘synthetic male version’ of herself, with whom she has a romantic relationship. In Abel & I, the interaction with Abel takes →
The interactive sound installation Δ [Delta] makes biological data audible by capturing it directly from plants. What sets this bio-sonic work by artist Miha Godec apart is its immediacy: there are no intermediaries, just a direct transformation from signal to →
Telescopes have historically been the first substantial ‘augmentation’ of our eyesight. The technical properties of focus and magnification of optics have exponentially extended our vision of far-away matter. Now with our imaginary progressively colonised by computational visuality, all that we →
This work by the American artist Morry Kolman presents itself as a website that offers smartphone users the possibility to transform a network of over 900 cameras made available (not for this use!) by the Department of Transportation, into a →
In the sound installation umwandler, Nika Schmitt experiments with the idea of an autonomous system of energy generation and conservation. The work consists of a sort of huge electromagnetic coil installed inside Berlin’s Water Reservoir, an empty and bombastic circular subterranean →
