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.
Polygen is a generative grammar engine developed by Italian programmers that constantly update it with new and extremely funny grammars. The software generates various linguistic stereotypes, blending variables dependingon syntactic rules and lexical schemes. For example →
Constanza Silva is a new media artist who creates complex interactive environments where sound and robotic are the essential elements of a connected network. Silverfish Stream is her most recent artwork and, according to the →
Ringing the bell to the Americans. This is the final goal of Swipe, a machine designed by Beatriz de Costa, Jamie Schulte and Brooke Singer. For improving its effectiveness they have camouflaged their machine as an →
Polygen is a generative grammar engine developed by Italian programmers that constantly update it with new and extremely funny grammars. The software generates various linguistic stereotypes, blending variables depending on syntactic rules and lexical schemes. For →
dvd video – Arcnaut
3D graphics, even if it never entered the list of available tools for every user, has had an important aesthetic role in the magma of transformations that stormed the nineties. →
According to its author, the software artist Sven Koenig, Scrambeld?HaCkZ! is a useful tool aimed to infringe copyright. Konig claims that intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting with the principles of any cultural →
The sequencing software interface is a de-facto cultural syntax with which sounds are composed, and, starting with the basic tasks accomplished (as the sounds drag and drop for their sequencing, and their eventual →
PD (acronym of Pure Data) has recently emerged amongst the many software devoted to real time sampling and audio/video streaming, mostly thanks to its flexibility during live performances. It’s a real time coding environment suitable for →
A 630-680 mm laser scanning device and a couple of disposable contact lenses. These are the needed tools for tuning Read Only memory, an installation by Judith Fegerl. The visualization of the lived experiences, →
Chris O’Shea, a digital artist living in the UK, has always been interested in the relationship between interactive spaces and sound synthesis. However he recently decided to explore the connection between synthesis (aka frequency modulation) →
