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 control mechanisms based their power on the identification of unique entities controlled, thanks to the technologies applied to cross the evidence to verify the uniqueness itself. This overlap of data which aims at reconstructing →
dvd video – Baltic
Camera surveillance gives rise to many questions: how are people’s movements perceived by the watchers? How do their behaviour changes when they feel observed? What kind of archive is created →
The recovery of sound data and their connection with visual data related to a place, involves the establishment of ties arbitrary, but in some way related to the subjectivity of the person carrying them out. →
The reinterpretation of television images, making them exit the video and placing them in different contexts, it implies a transformation of meaning that breaking the habit-forming mechanism of the small screen, →
The recognition of the images and their synchrony with the sounds that accompany them temporally determine peaks of attention that the Granular Synthesis, ie Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich, have enjoyed for more than →
The politics of terror, continuous-security and self-legitimation of control and repression has brought about critical thinking that is slowly gaining strength, spanning the various cultural sectors, not least through music, bands and musicians that process dissent →
dvd video – Crónica
The fundamental role of the radio (the first source of ‘noise’ and the priincipal instrument for the conscience of sound, beyond the mere listening to music) is the theme →
book – Continuum – ISBN 0826416152
The genealogy of contemporary music passes through many essential points distant in time and in cultural ambits. Only now, in the time of networked information, we can trace →
The unavoidable hierarchy of importance of data on the Net that emerged thanks to search engines, whose goal is to represent ‘the best selection of contents’, represents a conceptual vicious circle. That is, the popularity of →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262693267 The consciousness of the objects that surround us and that ever more cheaply and more quickly are being proposed, is one of the cornerstones around which turns a →
The concept of modernism is based on the oxymoron of fresh obsolescence, and surrounds the objects of thirty years ago or so with an aura of rarity and nostalgia that give them a value →
The obsession with the memory that the unstable computer networks have inculcated turns, in certain cases, serial filings, not all inclusive, which attempt to preserve evidence and documents for future ethereal digital →
The art of 'field recordings', also called 'phonography', ie of environmental records manages to focus our attention to the sounds accidental, which typically escape the consciousness in the flow of everyday life. The idea of →
Digital culture, as several other areas related to innovation, has always lived the dichotomy between technical and academic, who sometimes have raised their fences to recognize and distinguish. The alleged sterile contradictions that are sometimes generated →
