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.
Confess.or by Gerhard Schwoiger is one of the ample range of ‘ReReligion’ projects. It is an interactive installation that places a basically lay interpretation on the catholic sacrament. The confession, instead of being a private request →
The icon that combines the western democracies and that self-legitimizes them in a millennial historical tradition is the parliament, the physical place where the people’s designated representatives rule. This icon has also become the →
Even if they are close to their own end because of wireless technologies as the cellular and voice-over-IP ones, the public phones are still present in the urban scenario, always heaven-sent or used →
With One Free Minute you have sixty seconds to letting your own thoughts, feelings (or anything else you feel the urge to communicate in a range of 50 meters) be heard from its physical →
FIRST3LINESThe Transmediale 2006 edition opens on 3rd February at the Akademie der Kunste of Berlin. It is one of the major media culture festival and it has changed its payoff into ‘festival for art and →
Quoting Armin Medosch “in a networked environment it is not so much individuality and expression that count but increasingly new ways of creating, sharing, disseminating digital work”. This is the basis of Markus Renschler’s project, FileSwap, →
book – The MIT Press – ISBN 0262134578
The record producer has been the deus ex machina of the pop aesthetic innovation in different historical moments. His role is being the architect of the →
“You maintain the power/till you have firmly in your hand the remote control” These are the mantic words sung by a famous Italian presenter, that could have been inspiring the young germans (MiniMe and Mahajivana) →
Do you remember Quake 3 Arena et similia? The so-called shoot-em-ups, where you fight against anybody else and where the only goal is to score the highest number of frags? That one that cause a cramp →
The Face of Tomorrow is an open source project on a global scale, founded on a series of pictures taken by Mike Mike during his travels, where he researches the concept of race, →
