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 feeling that time is flying by, coupled with the anxiety of impending deadlines, has become a distinctive trait of our insane standards of hyperproductivity. The feeling of inescapability arising from the sense of insufficient time, which comes in overwhelming →
The aleatoric voices of the street vendors are so situated in time (exactly when we pass by) and space (always in the same place) in such a way that they easily become memories or connections with stable coordinates. Coro Informal →
The forgotten quartz clock and its noisy pacing have been very familiar to a couple of generations: its rhythmic sounds have beaten the time of countless people. Gauthier Déplaude has started to use this object as a sound instrument in →
As processes become more accomplished and, more importantly, our reliance on machine learning steadily increases, so does our trust in anthropomorphic digital outcomes. This can inevitably lead to a trust in machine-based spiritual assessments, even from the calculations of the →
There was a time in the early history of the web when the pop-up windows started to be used to display invasive advertisement. Rapidly, as most of other web technology, it spread as a practice, reaching unbearable levels and inducing →
Let us consider the visualisation of processes as a component of contemporary sensibility. Artists have often made use of simplifying these processes through metaphorical visual and aural representation. Kathy Hinde has done this through a sublime practise. Her “Earthquake Mass →
In Mythic Landscape, Laura Criollo Carrillo allows the audience to enter a revealing space where the invisible and inaudible manifest. She uses infrared light and artificial electromagnetic fields that emit sounds outside our audible spectrum. She uses a modified digital →
DEPART group defines gardening as one of the most archetypal art forms. It encompasses many components, including aesthetics, practice and failure, and the recognition of complexity. Their “The Entropy Gardens” is a work of art that can be experienced in →
How heavy is the cloud? It is not easy to refute its iconic meaning, which is soft and particularly light, not to mention its total invisibility, except for some elements in GUIs. The harsh reality of heavy and energy-devouring servers, →
Domestic altars have existed in various civilisations since ancient times. They are an expression of the need to represent a supernatural, friendly being with whom one can communicate in order to overcome the complexities and absurdities of life. ALTAR-3000 by →
