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.
Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet define their Data Drops as a “data sculpturing project”. It uses data from a survey about people’s emotions towards personal data being used by third parties and matches them to a colour according to Robert →
Constant Verlag, ISBN: 978-9081145930, English, 360 pages, 2015, Brussels
Since the late nineties, Constant, the Brussels-based artist-run organisation, has been an ensign in the world of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, especially as FLOSS relates to design. Their commitment to support →
While the industry is building the commercial “Internet of Things,” embedding transmitters and tiny devices in objects of various shapes and sizes, other industrial objects are being produced, acquired and becoming obsolete. The perception of obsolescence is relatively subjective, but →
Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 978-0230242463, English, 200 pages, 2015, UK
Digital activism started simultaneously with the commercialisation of the Internet, embodying the desire to expand and materialise the promise of a horizontally democratic medium. Since then it has evolved in a →
The trajectory of Peter Sunde, from the glorious days of Piratbyrån (which he co-founded), complimented by then Brazilian president Lula, to his recent period in prison, is that of a coherent radical activist. His efforts to affirm the political and →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262526890, English, 600 pages, 2015, USA
Global Activism was another gargantuan exhibition effort in the notorious ZKM tradition, which took place at the end of 2013, attempting to survey “art and conflict” on a global scale. →
DIY, English, 164 pages, 2014, The Netherlands
In the first decade of the commercial internet, the information ecology was of imaginable dimensions. Due to natural growth and the influence of online giants and social media, this has definitively changed, with →
Historically holograms have been connected with “presence,” mainly for their 3D live presence and for their peculiar ghostly televised aesthetics. Holograms have also been connected to their quality of being “temporary”, so being visible/invisible depending from timing or perspective. The →
With the same graphic design of the original Ryanair website (if digital is infinitely duplicable, so is also corporate visual identity), RyanFair.org is a project announcing a special initiative by the biggest airline in Europe in the middle of refugee →
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 →
