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 use of data for pure aesthetic, ruins the means, and reduce the contents to a shapeless pile of digital material. This is handled as raw material, consisting of almost indistinguishable particles, that value only for →
There’s a hidden ecosystem under the trumpeted broadband explosion. The disturbance element of the data transmission that went wrong are natural events that belong to the net as the water losses of water are of →
dvd video – Index – Index DVD 014
There are still cultural phenomena that are prosperously developed in a delimited territory, even in current times, when we experience connections with far distant cultures and →
The sensorial overload we suffer from when we travel in public spaces, comes from the excessive information amount we are forced to face there (mostly advertising). In the advertisement’s spaces the juxtaposing of words →
From such a long time a dance and the electronic technologies have found a good connection, mostly in the use of motion sensors. These devices allowed the body to expand its movements beyond themselves, giving the →
The tv medium’s deconstruction is often based on a radical intervention on its essential mechanism: continous and hypnotic entertainment based on frequent light and color changes. TV has the universally acknowledged role of awareness’ persuader, through →
dvd video – I.M.C.C. / Metropolis Records
‘Making the revolution sexy’ is the catching slogan that David Trussell, songwriter from Melbourne, has followed for twenty years with his band, the Snog, a unique example of →
cd+dvd – C0C0S0L1DC1T1
The relation between sound and vision has become clearer since the introduction of their interpretation as sets of binary data. In their numerical abstraction, these →
The exponential grow of the information access has made us bulimic for our image daily dose, pretending it has to be always new and more and more unexpected. Moreover in our daily environment the →
cd+dvd – Ninja Tune
The language of videoclips has undergone many semiotical revolutions in the 90s, the years when the possibility of video editing landed on home computers. The consequential big increase in the number →
