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.
Chinese Teens Have Found Remarkable High-Tech Ways To Cheat On Tests, hiding cameras and microphones in pen, shirts, glasses transmitting wirelessly. http://www.businessinsider.com/high-tech-ways-to-cheat-2014-6?utm_content=bufferf6819&utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=buffer
OpenXanadu, 54 years later a Xanadu online working demonstration of the original Ted Nelson hypertextual idea which precognised the World Wide Web http://xanadu.com/xanademos/MoeJusteOrigins.html
The DDS De Digitale Stad is going to resurrect for Amsterdam libraries, preserving an important online infrastructure from 1994. http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Europe/2014/0329/In-Amsterdam-web-archaeologists-excavate-a-digital-city
[openspace] wilderness, preserving abandoned blog posts. An artwork by Andrew Lyman which collects blog posts older than six years in a unified interface with abandoned places pictures with shifted colours. An overall reconstructive glitch. http://www.openspacewilderness.com
Piratbyrån and Friends, celebrating freedom of digital sharing. Exhibition about Piratbyrån and its activities including the historical Pirate Bay at Furtherfield Gallery, London, opened just before Peter Sunde, one of the organisation founders has been arrested in southern Sweden. http://furtherfield.org/programmes/exhibition/piratbyran-and-friends
Iconic landscape with digital substitution, Eric Fleischauer, Universal Paramount, 2010, digital image, http://www.ericfleischauer.com/universalparamount.shtml
Neural collection available during Beyond New Media Art event in Ljubljana (at Kino Šiška)
Camilla Sørensen and Greta Christensen treat vinyls as pure material to be physically used and manipulated in their project Vinyl terror & horror http://vinylterrorandhorror.com/vinylterrorandhorror.com/live.html
A demonstration of the Picturephone by AT&T, allowing visitors to video chat at Futurama 2, during World’s Fair in New York in 1964. http://www.star-telegram.com/2014/04/12/5732774/visions-of-1964-worlds-fair-didnt.html
Erreur d’impression. Publier à l’ère du numérique, Last event with live presentations by Nandita Kumar (India) and Mez Breeze (skype live from Goulburn, Australia). https://www.facebook.com/events/484065621705415/?context=create&ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming
Dubbing VHS as an involuntary subversive activity during Cold War in Romania. http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000002708995/vhs-vs-communism.html
Ryan Roy found people on Facebook with the same name, dressed like in their profile picture and sent them friends requests, and all of them creeped out and changed their profile picture immediately http://imgur.com/a/IqXWj
The Machine to Be Another, swapping visions to swap self-perception http://www.themachinetobeanother.org
Unpainted, Media art fair January 17-20, Munich http://www.unpainted.net
