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.
Moozak, Kazoom#006, 236 pages, 2015
There’s already a small tradition of artists printing computer code on paper to represent respective media. For example, Mishka Henner prints artists’ books with the jpg code of early twentieth-century rare photographs (_IMG01), while David →
Disputes about global warming between different groups often come down to competing interpretations of data – to building evidence or dismissing it. Intellectual dispute sometimes hides that these are vital questions with very physical implications. Time and Tide Bell →
20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes is a performance by Darsha Hewitt, staged at the 2015 Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress. Hewitt builds twenty small electronic circuits with wires, chips, small components and nine-volt batteries in twenty minutes. The time →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262033930, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
Maybe it won’t be the “folk art of the future” as Brett Gaylor foresaw it, but remix is a socially accepted cultural paradigm and a popular practice. Gunkel wants to →
There seem to be a Canadian school of audiovisual performances involving electronic music, light and transparency, which maybe will be acknowledged in the future involving a few different artists. “Soft Revolvers” by Myriam Bleau seems to belong to this scene →
Norient Books, ISBN: 978-3952449608, English, German, French, Italian, pages 504, 2016, Bern
In order to grasp the most sensitive aspects of contemporary life we must relinquish simplicity. In working to apprehend an ever-changing and interdependent global landscape, a complex but →
We are immersed in invisible radio waves, almost all the time. This is a matter of fact in every city or town, with scientific studies divided on the possible physical consequences. We can trace the visualisation of electromagnetic waves to →
Audio recordings of a voice evoke a person and also the period when that person has that specific tone of voice. In our analogue past, tapes were the most popular repositories for voices, as they were personal and cheap media. →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822360612, English, 288 pages, 2015
Even if we consider “the voice” as a sound source, in an average personal imaginary ‘sound’ is something external, while “the voice” is something internal and intimate. If we add to →
cellF by Guy Ben-Ary is a “biological self-portrait” divided into two parts. First the artist reprogrammed his skin cells to transform them into a functional neural network, defined as his “external brain.” Then he developed a robotic body to →
