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’ →
The unawarely produced sounds by humans have been often used in composition, since Cage’s historical ground breaking envisions. But the continued exposure to such sounds becomes something different. Euphonia by Emma Smith is a sound art work sampling “interlocking rhythms, →
Philosophy, mythology, fantasy and ancient cultures from around the world are steeped in stories and figures that are often similar to one other. The creator Demiurge is certainly one of these: from the God Eru Ilúvatar and the Ainur born →
A sign of the time is the decommissioning of systems that are considered near obsolete or too expensive or inconvenient to be maintained. Take for example the 4300 air raid sirens of the national warning system in the Netherlands, due →
There’s an underlying question in the media industry about the possible near future implementations of social media streams, or which kind of familiar and intimate physical form they might assume in the next years. Playing with nostalgia, temporal paradoxes and →
Among the possible embodiments of invisible digital processes, the mechanical is one of the most fascinating, reversing in a way the course of history. In “bit” Jonghong Park is representing a natural random process, using the principles of a Markov →
Liquid Loom by Cere Davis is an installation made of a few backlit LCD glass panes, all recycled from vintage ATM screens. Their ‘bare liquid filled glass’ is framed and available for exposure to electrostatic energy activated by a guided →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038461, English, 416 pages, 2018, USA
The concept of ‘fake’ in art has been used as a ‘hallucinatory reality’ well before it was employed as a political weapon online. Conceptual art has →
How much similar is enough? Since machines have been capable of producing reality-like images, the visual likeness of reality has become a competitive goal for computer visuals, as it irresistibly attracts our attention. Simon Fujiwara’s “Likeness” is a challenging installation →
As Arvida Byström deatils, ‘to inflate’ means to make something that takes up little space occupy a much bigger space. Her “Inflated Fiction” performance at the opening of her exhibition at Stockholm’s Fotografiska consisted of the implementation of 30 NFC →
