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.
Turning common sense upside down is one of the most effective strategies in art, especially when dealing with hot social topics. Swine Flu (H1N1) has been the big viral outbreak of 2009. The few →
CD – Evil Rabbit
After an disquieting start, modulating on shrill guttural vocalizations and innervated with noisy and improvisational acts, Robert van Heumen intervenes on laptops and controller. He generates instrumental arrangements, →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775725231, Germany, 2009, English, German
Condensing thirty years of the Ars Electronica festival history into six hundred pages is the challenge of this book. It’s a tough task to →
CD – Mort Aux Vachez
The audio compact disk is presented rigidly bolted between three different rectangular wooden blocks, held together by metal hinges, then fixed through the usual split pin, the symbol →
A Chinese Cure for Internet Addiction – China – io9
"nanometer wave machines" used to cure internet addiction
(tags: science net hacktivism)
Cultural blogging in Europe: Interview with Alessandro Ludovico (Neural.it) – LabforCulture
The following interview between Alessandro Ludovico and Annette Wolfsberger took place on 2 June 2009 in Rotterdam.
(tags: neural.it)
Non-Player Character – words for digital girls and boys
Description: Shane Hinton + Netwurker →
TELE_TRUST
TELE_TRUST takes place in dynamic public spaces. Here Lancel and Maat invite the audience in six interactive, full body data-veils
(tags: art mobile performance)
CD – Prele
Narrow strips of wood, roughly five inches long, thin, connected to each other to reach a considerable length (up to ten meters), totally suspended by special rods, shape sinuous →
The tap-dance rhythmic lines are the protagonists in SoleNoid ß by Peter William Holden. Eight glossy tap-dance shoes, placed symmetrically in a circle, are animated by a computer connected with circuits controlling →
Split + Splice
Split + Splice, Del + Hel, is about the inter-relations between the culture of biomedicine and the enormous complexities of 21st century living
(tags: science art)
YouTube – Shii – The Wii for Women
A funny skit from the Belgian comedy →
Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0199567041, U.S.A., 2009, English
“Where does power lie in the network society?” This is the central question that Manuel Castells tries to answer in his first book in →
CD – Cronica
There are fourteen different tracks in “Lovely Banalities”, the second release on Crónica for the Lithuanian sound-artist Gintas K. Although there are multiple “field recording” interludes, connections and micro-frequencies, →
Fitbit
sousveillance for sleep and fitness
(tags: hacking media net)
Avatar Machine
Avatar Machine is a system which replicates the aesthetics and visuals of third person gaming, allowing the user to view themselves as a virtual character in real space via a head mounted interface.
(tags: art videogame performance)
Tape Express – IWOOT
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