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.
Various artists have manifested the physical presence of invisible networks, such as the painful Costraint City by Gordan Savicic in 2007. Since then, wireless networks have expanded in terms of range, power and data transmitted. In Ombres Blanches, the Lab212 →
Even after more than a century, radio is still a solid media paradigm, having been the first to establish the modern process of information transmission in space. radioPHØNIX is a radiophonic installation by Timo Kreuser & PHØNIX16 that utilises this →
The recent resurgence of magical practices may be related to the increasing complexity of technology, epitomised by AI. Among them are artists who combine both, such as Exorcismos (aka Moisés Horta Valenzuela), who in his project SEMILLA AI has assembled →
What if conspiracies are not a social phenomenon triggered by instability and social insecurities, but a business model that turns online communities into profitable customers? Robert Collins has researched this question and expanded on it with the combinatory power of →
Over the years, Jonas Staal has created various works that enable the political empowerment of the individual through collective action. In Propaganda Station, he builds an information and meeting structure in the form of an inverted panopticon. There are ’cells’ →
Can we finally consider the Yes Men’s interventions as ‘canon’? Their ever-effective interventions on capitalism’s spectacle stage continue. At the Web Summit, a man posing as an ‘adidas executive’ announced that they were ‘launching a virtual world for the underpaid →
Trevor Paglen has developed a series of works based on the well-known ‘Psychological Operations’ (PSYOP), i.e. deceptive military operations to influence the population through the audiovisual staging of non-existent facts or events. Cyclops is the latest in this series and →
For this installation, Tania Candiani took the “logbook” of Rayuela, the iconic novel by the Argentinean Julio Cortazar, in which the author recorded the process of writing the novel, using drawings and all kinds of signs to sketch it. She →
Starting from the idea that “fungal networks act like radio transmitters”, Myles Merckel has considered the VLF frequency band as the most suitable to engage in what he defines as Biological_Data_Transmission. The aim is to create systems for “identifying, amplifying →
According to a recent report by the UNHCR (United Nations Refugee Agency), wars, violence, human rights violations, and environmental disasters have increased the number of displaced people to 114 million people. Human lives from the most disparate cultures and origins, →
