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 ‘crowdsourcing’ is the controversial practice on which many services of the so-called web 2.0 are based. Crowdsourcing derives from ‘outsourcing’ (dislocating manufacturing activities where labour cost is cheaper), that basically consists →
dvd video – Aspect/Microcinema – ISBN 097496574X
If ‘identity’ is one of the most important topics concerning the digital possibilities of reality construction, ‘personality’ is a more general aspect of the core →
CD – Expanding Records
The atypical multimedia artist Orla Wren goes around Scotland in his motorhome, composing extremely delicate music, selling pictures of plants and insects, macros of organic life taken by →
Installed as ‘Distant Views‘ for the 2005 Boston Cyberarts Festival and subsequently as ‘Culture Catchers’ at the gallery G-A-S-P, the artwork made by Michael Sheridan is a sound installation consisting of a transparent →
CD – Touch/Family Affair
Four big and gloomy recordings, made respectively in those who were once public places (“Church”, “Auditorium”, “Swimming Pool”, “Gymnasium”), abandoned military bunkers, within the zone of the nuclear disaster →
Phonetica by Nao Tokui is a project that identifies homophones in the more than six thousands existing world languages. It’s a cross-disciplinary project that, reconciling art and science, propose an innovative key to the →
CD – Pogus
This is a project that started with a workshop curated by Francisco Lopez, which features eight artists active in the fields of sampling and field recordings, especially in inner spaces, who try to →
These people so scared by silence’ Chuck Palaniuk writes in Lullaby, ‘these sound-oholics are my neighbors’. To resist the siege of noise, some students from FAMU (Film Academy of Prague) has created OMBEA, an interactive →
CD – Crónica
A constant flow modulated by digital abstractions related to a voice: flirts, time flows, blood circulations, waves and derivations, overflowing at the end. This is a great and poetic →
Fayaz Jafri is a digital artist. Originally from Pakistani descent, he was born and raised in The Netherlands and now is active on the New York scene. If some of his illustrations →
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. →
