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.
book – The MIT Press – ISBN 0262072602
The ‘Open Source’ concept, even if often made ambiguous and cannibalized by the same industry whose exploiting principles is shattering, is one of →
Reproposing an ironic vision of an out of fashion past is one of the prerogatives of videogames, which have the possibility to recreate historic systems through simulations and keep afloat memories which the fury of information →
The time consumed by a screensaver is a dissipated time, interrupted and resumed in its segmented and indefinite manifestation. It’s a marginal time that automatically flows and silently accumulates its wealth of images shown on →
cd-rom – Printed Matter, Inc./Whitney – ISBN 0894390147
Drawing, as an artistic production process, has evolved its techniques constantly, changing according to the possibilities opened by new tools and the theoretical deviations that those →
The best day to launch this project was undoubtedly September 11th. The fake institutional tears flowed for the lukewarm memory commemorated a human disaster with a careful selection of morbid images, made to sow the same →
The coding of conceptual works through the programming code is a peculiar form of ‘digitalization’ that implies an important mediatic shift (from a material medium to an immaterial one), even if at the same time it →
The aseptic interfaces luck something. That’s evident giving a look at all that customizations and the aesthetic variations made by small and daring software houses. But this maquillages rarely engage in challenging the desktop metaphor’s foundations →
This is “user friendly” even in its name. The ‘Together We Can Defeat Capitalism (TWCDC)‘ collective has made an operating system really for the users, as opposed to a view of software →
RIXC – ISBN 9984953807
The yearly issue of Acoustic Space, a publication more similar to a book than to a magazine, this time hosts a large collection of essays on →
Nine(9) is the name of the latest work by the artists collective Mongrel, from London, already well-known for investigating the paradoxes of identity and truth in the ‘database culture’. Referring to a number which represents, among →
