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.
Alberto Novello has modified a Vectrex, a 1980s game console. In its current half analogue/half digital form (what he calls ”Celestial Harmonies”), it allows a user to draw with sound. With synaesthetic aspirations, the analogue monitor is artificially ’excited’ →
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 →
Trevor Paglen never runs short of new ways to use media to conceptually attack the guardians of state espionage, and in his new work, “Weeping Angel”, he is siming his sights at another universal symbol, but this time with a →
“sissi” by Shohei Fujimoto is formally a Japanese traditional “Shishi-odoshi” device. These devices are originally made to frighten away animals posing a threat to agriculture. They are based on the mechanism of the “sōzu”, which is a water fountain made →
We don’t need to resurrect McLuhan to notice whole armies of technological prosthetics surrounding us. If we stay on a symbolic level there are countless, but even if we restrict our search to the corporeal level there are still a →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1841506630, English, 442 pages, 2014, UK
Video artists from the heroic years (mainly sixties and seventies) would nowadays be rightfully considered “makers.” Their various forms of “hacking” with analogue video apparatuses of all kinds, include bric-a-brac solutions, →
One interesting category that requires proper analysis is that of the media-art “remake”. How are examples proposed by the historical avant-garde recuperated by today’s practitioners, and when can concepts such as copy, remake, re-appropriation, interpretation or kitsch (in the sense →
The Graffitizer project, by Daniel Berio, consists of a series of machines capable of generating abstract drawings associated with a sub genre of graffiti aesthetic known as Wildstyle. The style is characterised by a complex futuristic angular writing of overlapping →
Spatial sound diffusion is usually associated with electronic and electroacoustic music. Over the course of the 20th century a number of institutions were created that allowed pioneering composers to experiment with spatial audio diffusion, in most cases under the generous tutelage of →
Deep in the core of the Kindle (Amazon’s e-book reader) terms and conditions there is one clear sentence concerning the ownership of digital content: “Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider”. This means that every →
