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.
O'Reilly, ISBN 0-596-00105-3 There are essays which were redacted, while showing next to the time that has passed since their first edition, are balanced and informative even after a few years. 'Database Nation' seems to →
RIXC, ISBN 9984-9538-0-7
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 architectures built by and with media and →
V2_NAi Publishers, ISBN 90-5662-353-2
In a prolific flow of productions on paper, Geert Lovink, founder of NetTime and coordinator of many initiatives of net criticism, has just published his third book in little more than one →
Mixture of styles, mutations in the contemporary musical trends, new horizons of communication, generational drift. Phenomena are difficult to interpret, as there are efforts in finding parallels in past seasons, reviews on the exciting and →
M-Cult, ISBN 952-91-5880-5 There is a specific culture in media art produced in the extreme northern regions of Europe? And more generally, there are specific territorial characteristics in the forms of art media, by its →
Shake Edizioni, ISBN 88-86926-79-0, 196+cd, Italiano, Italy,
‘Reasoning for not but metaphors for metamorphosis. ‘
‘Zut has become most perfect, most perfect is to become Zut.’
‘Radio Alice is a test, one of the many’, aired in the ether, in →
The Mit Press, ISBN 0-262-57168-4
This update of a historical book on digital freedom restates a historical perspective which emerged in the late Nineties. This text sends a strong signal, stressing that the principles to defend →
MIT Press, ISBN 0-262-122566-1
The explicitly stated intent of the editors of this book, who work for the Media and Communication Department of the University of Oslo, is to finally get over the vision of the →
Nifca Publication, ISBN 951-8955-74-3
The definition of ‘software art’ still has a long way to go to enter the Oxford Dictionary, but the Read_me festival is doing a good work in defining its characteristics and cultural →
An interesting collection of flyers which tell the not-so-official history of the electronic Barcelona (from the beginning of the Nineties to the present). This city has witnessed the birth and evolution of a local scene linked →
