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 phenomenon of 'livecoding' music has slowly reflection on the sound generation induced minute by minute performative immediacy of the VJ, which came now to be part of common sense. The large collective called →
The media coverage of urban public space (the place most affolato of stimuli to the purchase of goods, with the exception of the television screen) has prompted the creation of many →
book – The MIT Press – ISBN 0262033283
The ‘media activism’ was born well before the telematic networks and it has manipulated the media, first the electric and then the electronic one, with the →
magazine – O’Reilly Media, Inc. – ISBN 0596100787
The best seller hacker magazines (2600, Blacklisted 411) have spread to the public the innovative and sometimes genial techniques of electronic systems manipulation. they emerged from the →
The coding of conceptual works through the programming code is a peculiar form of ‘digitalization’ that implies an important mediatic shift (from a material medium to an immaterial one), even if at the same time it →
cd+dvd – C0C0S0L1DC1T1
The relation between sound and vision has become clearer since the introduction of their interpretation as sets of binary data. In their numerical abstraction, these →
There’s a place on the web where anybody can confess what he never told. It’d be a regret, a hope, a desire or a fear. PostSecret welcomes any contribution, but only if it’s sincere and non →
Abstract forms, making them emerge from the mechanisms of software designed to fulfill different tasks, it is one of the founding principles of generative art. At the same time, between the software that continuously produce →
The aesthetics of the essential, after being developed in different times in history, seems to have become a dominant prerogative of modern times. In the crowd of information and consequent complex selection decisions, taken consciously →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0262072602 The concept of 'Open Source', though often made ambiguous and cannibalized by the industry itself which undermines the principles of savage exploitation, is one of →
This product has nothing to do with the Mecca Cola & Co., nor with other sparkling drinks that have marketing strategies like presenting as a safe alternative to the U.S. giants or, sometimes, →
The inevitable hierarchy of importance of data over a network, which originated in the time because of search engines, whose goal is to always be 'the best selection of content' in relation to specified keyword, →
One of the specificity of today's digital cameras is that you have returned to a mass audience in a rendered image semi-professional, also thanks to the infinite possibilities of evidence permitted by the shots →
The interdisciplinary approach that characterizes the most interesting groups of audiovisual music sheds light on how the concept of 'group', especially if you also linked to a live performance dimension, has long since crossed musical →
