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.
Liquid Loom by Cere Davis is an installation made of a few backlit LCD glass panes, all recycled from vintage ATM screens. Their ‘bare liquid filled glass’ is framed and available for exposure to electrostatic energy activated by a guided →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038461, English, 416 pages, 2018, USA
The concept of ‘fake’ in art has been used as a ‘hallucinatory reality’ well before it was employed as a political weapon online. Conceptual art has →
CD – Crónica
Just two tracks, “G”, twenty minutes long, and “S”, thirty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds. It’s this the debut of the duo Luís Antero e Darius Čiuta for Crónica. The album is the result of a very personal →
How much similar is enough? Since machines have been capable of producing reality-like images, the visual likeness of reality has become a competitive goal for computer visuals, as it irresistibly attracts our attention. Simon Fujiwara’s “Likeness” is a challenging installation →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517903664, Englidh, 296 pages, 2018, USA
It is not unfair to consider poetry as a system. So far we can look at it as a dynamic system →
LP – Dacapo
On the island of Holmen, in the center of Copenhagen, stands the Copenhagen Opera House, one of the most important and expensive opera houses ever made. For political and fiscal reasons, and also because of its →
As Arvida Byström deatils, ‘to inflate’ means to make something that takes up little space occupy a much bigger space. Her “Inflated Fiction” performance at the opening of her exhibition at Stockholm’s Fotografiska consisted of the implementation of 30 NFC →
University of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226543178, English, 272 pages, 2018, USA
The invisibility of sound has led to various different interpretations of its structure and consequent impact on human beings. But its continuity →
CD + book – SUPSI
Within audio-art and sophisticated music research there are many productions based on the crossing over between different art forms and subjects. It is a symbiosis of sounds, images, storytelling, theories and philosophies, that offers a →
Among personal data, online dating profiles are the most sought-after. They represent the most intimate data, which people give to the platform without completely understanding the potential consequences. Artist Joana Moll and Tactical Tech have purchased 1 million of these →
The MIT Press, SBN-13: 978-0262036689, English, 328 pages, 2017, USA
What Jennifer Rhee calls a “robotic imaginary” is put to the test when it comes to sex robots, a space where there is still a →
Vitor Joaquim – Impermanence
A feeling of anxiety immediately takes us when listening to “Here and Now”, the first track of the last release by Vitor Joaquim, a sound artist we remember especially for his works produced by Knivitu, →
Darkness is a prerogative of moments of rest, of places where intimacy is required; it is also synonymous with perdition, or worse, with the absence of hope, with emptiness, danger, or the unexplored. The bottom of the ocean is desperately →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1478002925, English, 308 pages, 2018, USA
Different countercultural generations have different references, usually borrowed from what they have culturally available and accessible around them. The pre-digital ones could count on →
