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.
Issue #71 Winter 2022 ISSN: 2037-108X
The new Neural issue (co-edited with Daphne Dragona, Jussi Parikka) is hot from the press.
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Cassette – CCSS++
Diogo Tudela is a media artist and independent researcher whose practice is informed by speculative IT, mechatronics and science fiction. He teaches sound art and creative programming at School of Arts — UCP since 2019, →
Council of Europe, ISBN 978-9287191496, English, 272 pages, 2022, France
This is an edited anthology of texts that offer critical positions on AI and its all-encompassing effects on society. In the introduction, Ćosić demands a →
Meatspace Press, ISBN: 978-1913824020, English, 206 pages, 2021, UK
Books like this should make a difference. There is so much hype surrounding AI and its (im)possible solutions to many of our problems, solutions which often →
In the dystopian play “The Ventriloquists’ School” by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a ‘free man’ falls into a deserted street and, panicked, takes refuge in a non-place populated by slaves and masters where puppets and manoeuvres live under the control of the →
OnlyFans, perhaps the largest website in the world where users can post content that is not allowed elsewhere, is a successful business model for monetising the increasingly consolidated like mechanism. On one side are the content creators – artists, personal →
“This Sculpture Doesn’t Exist” recalls in its title some well-known endless generators of machine-generated photorealistic results. But Matteo Rattini created it as a weighted process driven by some conceptual coordinates. He trained a neural network to generate images of sculptures →
one sided white vinyl LP + poster + insert – Ricerca Sonora
These three algorithmic compositions from newcomer Pier Alfeo and released on the Ricerca Sonora label were made with Wolfram – the programming language of the Mathematica software system, →
Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300209570, English, 336 pages, 2021, USA
This is meant to be a conceptual atlas of Artificial Intelligence with all the context it deserves, far beyond the projections of our fascination with →
Intellect, ISBN-13: 978-1789384956, English, 246 pages, 2021, UK
This is not the catalogue of the homonymous exhibition which took place between 2018 and 2022 at Galerie Charlot in Paris and Tel Aviv, at Watermans in London →
