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.
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 →
When someone like Nicolas Nova dies, we are tempted to ask in despair: Why? Or rather: Why him? In the ir/rationality of life and death, we wish that brilliant and generous minds (a very rare combination) would simply live forever. →
Media art often encourages a sense of sharing, if not the formation of temporary communities around a common event or goal. Various artists have combined this with technologies that influence our perception – Mogens Jacobsen is one of them. →
The exposure to spoken words instigates an immediate response from our biological senses, especially if the content is sensitive. Matt Gingold’s Delay Orkestra is designed to test this sensitivity by playing and recording psychiatric descriptions of ‘mental disorders’ through a →
The inner generative properties of literature can be found in various works, such as the exemplary “Cent mille milliards de poèmes” by Raymond Queneau, which is created by cutting up pages. Richard Vijgen’s The Case for a Small Language Model →
The port has been, since ancient history, a recognized symbol of the expansion and commercial power of a country. A source of trade and a crossroads of communications, the port has historically favored the development of civilizations. Port cities have →
Panoramas (360-degree paintings from the late 19th century) are considered the forerunners of today’s immersive environments. Timothy Thomasson’s system in I’m Feeling Lucky, remodulates this original medium. A large curved screen shows 3D landscapes calculated in a game engine and →
The work FM-TOTEM by Dmitry Morozov, aka ::vtol::, is reminiscent of the tall, slender silhouette of totems, those mystical objects that evoke a deep, ancestral symbolism. This choice may have been made in honour of the technology on which it →
In martial arts and other combat sports, the importance of rules has a deep-rooted ethical and philosophical foundation directly proportional to the violence of the sport itself. The stronger the athlete can hit, the more solid and respectable his figure →
To what extent are the sounds we use when speaking influenced by the surrounding soundscape? We may adapt our vocal communication to the conditions in which we find ourselves, but this (perhaps even reciprocal) influence could also be traced back →
