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.
If the digital economy is now based on the abstraction of the shop into coding and interfacing its space on a screen, its epitome is the boundless Amazon experience. In “The Hidden Life of an Amazon User” Joana Moll ‘declassifies’ →
Melville House, ISBN-13: 978-1612197493, English, 256 pages, 2019, USA
This is a potentially subversive book. Affirming that we should take more time offline for nurturing our own thoughts (and so our own being) does not →
One of the roles of sound art is to transform spaces by changing how we perceive them. Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela have mastered this approach in recent years, constructing installations made in classic or adventurous places whose sound, in →
The elderly Viv notices our presence and invites us to sit in her kitchen, right there in front of her, where she can see us. Thus began the interactive video experience “The Visit“, born from the collaboration of the artist →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262039802, English, 464 pages, 2019, USA
Nam June Paik is back in the limelight, thanks to an important historical exhibition at Tate Modern (see the report in this issue). There has →
The unpredictable resurgence of vinyl has rekindled an interest in physical sonic structures. Gilles Azzaro’s “Macrogroove” realises the idea of a three-dimensional sonogram. It is a 3D printed ‘audio coding’, which is played by a laser beam, scanning the form →
“Alienated Vision” by Hsin-Chien Huang includes a series of studies related to stereoscopic vision, based on a disjunction between the images aimed for the left and right eye. Their combination is necessary for our brain to perceive three-dimensional space. In →
The possibilities to create objects with the digital, which are both familiar and alien, are infinite, because it can abstract any materiality into malleable information. “Void“ by Félix Luque, Damien Gernay and Iñigo Bilbao exquisitely demonstrates this point. It’s a →
The space for politics has shrunk, either ’deported’ to social media and online spaces in general, self-ghettoized in homogeneous circles or lost in the crowd of leaders’ profiles, not to mention the pollution of human and bot paid troll armies. →
Jap Sam Books, ISBN-13: 978-9492852144, English, 368 pages, 2019, The Netherland
The Netherlands have a specific history of media art, which is recounted in this perfectly laid out, full colour volume. Huisman and van →
