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.
Hatje Cantz, ISBN: 978-3775741026, English, 352 pages, 2016, Germany
Thank goodness we still have major personal exhibitions that produce extensive monographs of relevant artists, without having to rely on publishers’ taste and economics alone. This thick luxurious ZKM catalogue of →
Attempted technological connections with the afterlife are frequent and usually speculative (see, for example, the Extra Fantômes catalogue review in this same issue). “Artificial Afterlife” by artist Amy Whittle fits perfectly with this approach, constructing a system that is technically →
Every once in a while an artist whose work you thought you knew manages to surprise you. With her new video series Monochrome(s) the Austrian artist known as Lia did just that. I know Lia through the mid nineties net →
The small blinking plastic boxes that forge a connection with the digital world (and the upcoming Internet of Things (IoT)) have become ubiquitous in private houses, in much the same way as analogue TV sets were a few decades ago. →
“If computer games nowadays feel like work, why not consider them as such?” This is the provocative question Peter Buczkowski poses in his “Current Times.” In this installation he implements a specific division of labour in video-game playing, such that →
The fragility of an object is not merely related to its physical properties, but also to its ability to maintain the same shape over time. Soap bubbles perfectly represent fragility and Verena Friedrich’s “The Long Now.” Friedrich built a machine →
Archive Books, ISBN-13: 978-3943620344, English, 288 pages, 2015, Germany
This is the catalogue of the exhibition “Eran Schaerf. FM-Scenario: Reality Race,” a composite documentation of the artist’s work. Schaerf produced artists’ news radio plays since 1997, and, since 2002, a →
Fracking is already famous as one of the most environmentally devastating practices used to extract hydrocarbons from the soil. It injects large volumes of high-pressure water into the ground in order to break rocks and facilitate the flow of shale →
Dust Bunny by Alan Warburton is a small bunny composed from “dust harvested from ten visual effects workstations” at Studio Mainframe. The bunny is not an accidental shape, but an exact representation of the so-called Stanford Bunny, a 3D test →
Fitness data has become one of the most popularly produced “big data” about us as quantified selves. The tricky mechanism, successfully enabled by fitness-related technologies, aims to grant instant rewards through slick interfaces and precise quantifications, inherently subverting the fact →
