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.
CD – Pogus
An asserter of frugality (“I think it doesn’t make sense to discard old technologies just because there are some new ones”), the Argentinian Anla Courtis prefers obsolete tape recordings →
The AV festival one of the major British festival dealing with electronic art, digital music, games and new media in general, is still running in NewcastleGateshead, Sunderland and Middlesbrough. The main theme of this →
One of the most fascinating challenges pushed by the gathering of huge amount of digital data is to find effective solutions of visualization. From green letters on a black background in the first terminals →
A virtual space that sprouts from the inner urban fabric. An interface that let the users – equipped with iPods, mobiles and laptops – enter wifi networks and simply share sound files. →
Are media a mirror of the world? To what extent do media reflect reality condition? They do, but unfortunately only superficially and in a fragmented way. The concept of a fragmented mirror is →
Germaine Koh is a Canadian visual artist active internationally. Her conceptually-generated work is concerned with the significance of everyday actions, familiar objects and common places. Her latest artwork, presented at ZeroOne San Jose / →
Trying to track the individual paths that crosses the urban territory. This is what Footprint Mapping, developed by Noriyuki Fujimura, does. It’s focused on the relationship between interactive art and public spaces. Footprint →
CD – Nexsound
Moglass are an Ukrainian combination devoted to tangled improvised sounds, even thought they stem from elementary iterations, with drones and digital effects, who give birth to a really fascinating →
So-called old media actually have the chance of being not only enhanced but finally recontextualized through the new ones. This process must take in count the very nature of the medium and play →
book – Univ Of Minnesota Press – ISBN 0816648514
Beyond the narratology / ludology debate, videogames studies are catalyzing theoretical energies everywhere. But investigating the videogame medium in its own essence →
CD – Bip Hop/Wide
This is the eighth volume of the Bip Hop Generation series, one of the most consolidated and interesting collections in the new electronic scene, →
Exploring the relationship between man and artificial life seem to be the purpose of Bion, a project realized by Adam Brown, an artist studyin electronic media dynamics, and Andrew H. Fagg, an Oklahoma University →
Is it possible to hide your search path on the web? In the wake of AOL’s apparent release of of details of users’ Internet searches, as well as reports of various search engines tracing the →
CD – Cut
Recorded in Gabriel Paiuk’s home studio, in Buenos Aires, on November 30, 2004, “Breathings” marks the encounter of two different, but not too far apart, sensitivities: the “improvising” one of →
