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.
Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0500203679 The multiple roots on one side and the other ramifications of digital art will continue to make an object fascinating and elusive at the same time for the categories of contemporary art. The indissoluble bond with the technologies and their complex technical and conceptual structure continues to be an obstacle to the integration of works based on the transformation of data through scheduled jobs in a more extended analysis and study that will enable the development contextualization and prospects even more large and directly connected to everyday experience. Despite this, the lucid systematization developed by Paul allows you to compress the essential features of a thriving artistic production that runs through nearly two decades in a little over two hundred pages, by selecting exhaustively the different lines of research adopted by artists. This demarcating the differences in very different approaches along with their direct consequences. For example, the use of digital technologies in an instrumental, able to bring out the artificial representation of reality, often simply distorting the coordinates, is clearly distinguished in a separate chapter of its use as a medium, which involves many other considerations on the middle and on the meanings that it can generate from its intrinsic characteristics. And the rifts that open in the categorization of themes applied many windows offer reading of the themes that have collected the largest following and at the same time are able to impact more digital culture. But despite this excellent work, the lack of a broader vision and rooted inextricably with our time continues to take its toll, leaving blurred, as covered an opaque veil, the glittering and continuous innovation in the methods of communication which resulted with digital media.
