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.
Autonomedia, ISBN 1-57027-139-9
‘Behind the Blip’ addresses the need of a critical and pragmatic analysis of that complex and fleeting entity called ‘software’. The constant presence of interpretative interfaces for any kind of communications between people →
Mit Press, ISBN 0-262-24045-9
‘To know the rules of play’ becomes a recursive phrase if it’s applied to the act of designing games. On the other hand, games, in their electronic versions, have become more and →
Mit Press, ISBN 0-262-24045-9
‘To know the rules of play’ becomes a recursive phrase if it’s applied to the act of designing games. On the other hand, games, in their electronic versions, have become more and →
Edition Selene, ISBN 3-85266-194-3
Publishing a collection of essays under the disguise of a dictionary is hardly a novelty, but it’s not simple to present it with agile and comprehensive ‘definitions’ of a popular yet still →
The MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-10101-7 The sudden change in the rules imposed from access simultaneous and equal information, obtained through the network, sparked the curiosity of many social scientists that the last five years have →
Communication guerrillas or strategy, tactics and practice of an unconventional and subversive use of some of the main forms of creativity aimed at sabotaging the most current complex system of rules almost always creeping expression →
The Banff Centre Press, ISBN 0-920159-94-X
A long personal journey through the media mutation of the end of the Seventies to the dawn of the new millennium, describing a natural visionary nature, consequence of an artistic →
The book Net.Art Loarte Connection, published by the publishing house Shake has always been attentive to the emerging realities of the underground culture (and not only) Italian and international, traces the history of international net.art →
Dance and computer science, materiality of bodies and apparent fading of circuits and connections, which may seem worlds away instead contribute to defining new horizons of confluence articulated in contemporary artistic practices. All digital information →
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Fact, ISBN 0-9541604-9-5
Curated by Armin Medosch, this ‘introduction to the free software world and to copyleft culture’ collects in an agile and graphically nice booklet, with cd-rom included, texts, works and software →
