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 long-standing man/machine interface historical discourse is no longer frozen on the linguistic distance between the two elements since sensors and software have started to be more widely available. Now the aim is to be in synch, or even in →
When Trump Studies, as they inevitably will, become embedded in media/communications courses over the next year or two, one project most likely to be in the core curriculum is David Neeval’s “@burnedyourtweet.” He launched it anonymously in March this year, →
Developed by Marie Caye in collaboration with Arvid Jense and the farm Vair, “Pigstrument” is meant to be a musical instrument for pigs. It is shaped in a way that means it can roll around, allowing it to play to →
The association between ‘blood’ and ‘life’ is an ancestral one. When blood is then displaced out of the body, it is then perceived as weakness and possible death, as life itself has been partially sucked out of the involved person. →
The social perception of the internet has rapidly evolved, sporadically incorporating vivid fears about our devices’ invasion and the ways in which they might affect and infect human life. The technical level of these fears is ungraspable for the average →
Questioning our general fascination with automation, Attachment explores the lack of serendipitous communications that arises alongside the notion of automation and machine learning. Colombini, inspired by the machines of Swiss sculptor Tinguely, has created a machine that allows one to →
The passivity induced by politicians’ rhetoric has been gloriously celebrated from biology to art and mass media theory, but it has never been accredited as much as after the populist waves within politics which occurred in 2016. The pervasive disillusion →
Digitalisation and consequent physical duplication have now reached the point where they can be technically joined outside the makers’ labs where they more usually proliferate. Watching a 3D file, representing a concrete object and thinking about the infinite potential of →
A line of draped earbud headphones forms a three meter long semi-transparent curtain which divides a gallery space between a sonic interior and exterior. Each headphone outputs different patterns of white noise so that inside the curtain the listener is →
Fancy birthday parties, stunning sunsets, early morning creepy faces, beaches, rooftops, cats and food at will…social networks are literally invaded. About 10% of the worldwide photographic heritage, starting with the first famous Niepce shot of 1826, was shot in the →
