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.
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036757, English, 544 pages, 2017, USA
Let’s take the vast public attention on AI, and some of the hypothetical but popular consequences: machine awareness, autonomous artificial entities, and in the →
“Playing God” is a classic artist strategy which can be used to mask the rising sense of frustration for our current ecological crisis. Conceiving and implementing functional systems that reconfigure how nature works, instantly show the precariousness of our interventions, →
Communications technology has accustomed us to rapid developments that seem to tend to accelerate further. The web first, telephony after, plus all the declinations and variations on the theme: streaming, chatting, blogging … and this is only talking about the →
Getting in touch with the work of artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand requires a multidisciplinary point of view, an approach that goes beyond just looking. Observation is in fact only the starting point that they themselves describe as the →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035262, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
The essential moment of transition between the mechanical and the media takes place rapidly with the pervasive use of electricity. Its impact on our perception of sounds, beyond →
Adrede Editora, ISBN: 978-9569340109, Spanish, English, 220 pages, 2016, Chile
In the 21st century, art is closer than ever to science. Science has become an extremely popular subject in our lives: we chat about chemistry and biology for →
Vitra Design Museum, MAK, ISBN-13: 978-3945852118, English, 328 pages, 2017, Germany
Programmatically avoiding the lavish newness in technology design, this catalogue of the ‘Hello, Robot.’ exhibition revolves around our relationship with autonomous tech, beyond the omni-comprehensive effort of the show, →
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 →
There’s a new way to understand (complex) prosthetics, not as an instrument to ’empower’ the body with expanded faculties, nor to re-enable body parts which have been lost, but to undergo a completely different status which would instead limit the →
University Of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226002736, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Among the overlooked aspects of the “digitalisation of everything” is the perception of colours on screens, and how they are produced (or better, “performed”). In this thoroughgoing research project →
