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.
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816695713, English, 256 pages, 2015, USA
Decades after McLuhan, we’re still naturally inclined to embrace technology as prosthetics, or something that expands our faculties in a wide range of practical and abstract abilities. But the →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415500593, English, 192 pages, 2014, UK
The ability of digital information, especially when constantly in flux, to alter our perceptions is still to be acknowledged and properly studied, despite several decades of artworks using media to illustrate the →
Touch, # Folio 001, ISBN-13: 978-1874104018, English, 60 pages, 2015, UK
The inception of a new series (“Folio”) of hardcover books is a significant step for Touch, one of the most important “multi/media” UK music labels, with its more than →
University Of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226002736, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Among the overlooked aspects of the “digitalisation of everything” is the perception of colours on screens, and how they are produced (or better, “performed”). In this thoroughgoing research project →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029582, English, 368 pages, 2015, USA
More so than now, there have been other times in history when humanity started to think less about the present and even less about the future, and looked for inspiration →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1623560942, English, 296 pages, 2014, USA
It’s interesting how temporary and highly focused exhibitions can materialise the research and curatorial ideas behind them into long standing books, in a way that crystallises their whole course. This is →
The MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, ISBN-13: 978-0262527194, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
In the vast magmatic territory between science and media art, the concept of “system” occupies a strategic outpost, especially after the first developments of cybernetic studies. But this concept, →
Duke University Press, IISBN-13: 978-0822358893, English, 296 pages, 2015, USA
How we can define “sound” in the 21st century? Moreover, how can we define it indirectly through some of its key components? This book edited by David Novak (author of →
PML Books, ISBN-13: 978-1906496968, English, 188 pages, 2014, UK
Stemming from the Mute magazine crew, the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University has become an exciting base for a number of artists and researchers. They have developed projects under the theoretical →
Near Future Laboratory, Volumique, ISBN-13: 978-295500709, English, 112 pages, 2014, USA
Plenty of extremely niche digital cultures are still to be recognised, not only by the mainstream, but also by the non-initiated. If there’s one prophecy from the golden beginnings →
