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.
Staying in to play is the project of the artist and game designer John Paul Bichard, who has decided to make public his period of stay virtual (online artist in residence) at Variablemedia. Starting from February →
.hacktivism
08.04.03 Life is like water, life as a liquid sequence of images.
‘Life is like water‘ is a new work by Peter Horvath (who’s also the author →
It is revealed by the expression eyes that you can read the most intimate and effective use of our thoughts? This seems to be one of the possible interpretations of Selfportrait , a work of Vladimir →
Image-to-sound conversion is a fluid theoretical frontier hard to limit to a simple association by similarities. In the field of sound composition, through the use of image-elaboration software, this practice, effectively implemented by the software MetaSynth, →
'Less is more' is one of the mottos of the wide and varied movement of the contemporary digital minimalism, which expresses a play on words with the aesthetic tendency to steal and simplify as a form →
Tru ValU is a work of Californian Nanette Wylde who takes the color palette of the web as a system in its own right and a metaphor for relationships. The 216 colors of which is guaranteed →
Dial a programming language is an exquisitely linguistics, as well as technique, which involves sweeping views and abstraction enough to allow an effective description of the processes (the reality) with the structures implemented (words), and their →
Isabel Saij is a French artist who conducts systematic small experiments in flash and quicktime to expose the redundancy of the interaction and its sides less controllable by the user. His interactive works are small with →
Annotations is the first web work by Glenn Ligon, an artist who loves african-american culture and who, until today, had used more traditional techniques to share its material. In his latest project for the Walker Art →
Geo.Graphic is software that is inspired by the programs used by the military criminal investigation. After September 11, the French Joachim Lapôtre gave visual form to the various reports of the NSA on fugitives and escapees, →
