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.
Neural 77, Reorientations co-edited with Morten Søndergaard + extra: the artist’s postcard “here:this place, a listening exercise” by Jana Winderen. Subscribe now!
Issue #76, 2025 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: the artist’s postcard →
Christian Skjødt Hasselstrøm (also author of Illumination) is an artist who develops instruments that extend our cognition and our bodies to what we cannot consciously perceive. In collaboration with Kaj Nielsen, he developed SCAN, an array of rotating detectors with →
Set Margins’, ISBN 978-9083449821, English, 172 pages, 2024, The Netherlands
In the narrow field where artists have directly engaged with economic powers (such as Bureau d’Études), we can certainly include the systematic and intrepid work of →
CD – true blanking
Kjell Bjørgeengen, Keith Rowe and John Tilbury are three central figures in contemporary experimental music, each with a trajectory that has helped redefine adjacent fields. Bjørgeengen, a Norwegian visual artist, has revolutionised the dialogue between sound →
By abstracting AI prediction models that analyse past textual and visual productions to develop possible new or ‘future’ content, we can also elaborate a different past based on a more distant past. Miloš Trakilović develops this concept in 564 Tracks →
CD – Swarming
This is the first collaboration between Marc Baron and Eric La Casa, two leading figures in the French and international experimental sound scene. Baron is an electroacoustic composer and live performer, known for his unconventional approach to →
Springer, ISBN 978-3031474033, English, 186 pages, 2024, Germany
Following their earlier book Ciencia Abierta / Open Science, Marcelo Velasco and Ignacio Nieto, both from Santiago de Chile, have written an ambitious book about the perennially →
Viral Infection is an installation by Johannes Kiel. It uses machine nests to produce the PLA bioplastic they are made of and also calculates their production needs, while a ‘virus machine’ attempts to infect further hosts in order to multiply. →
CD – Gruenrekorder
A thought process deeply rooted in reality and then codified into abstract models, guided the career of Pietro Grossi who passed away in 2002. A composer, theoretician, pioneer of music informatics and founder of the Studio di →
Spector Books, ISBN 978-3959056878, English, 170 pages, 2024, UK
Goldsmiths’ Centre for Research Architecture is a very special and important place for critical media, with its interconnections to the Forensic Architecture research group and a →
Marine biophony, which are sounds produced by living organisms in the sea (as opposed to antropophony which are sounds produced by humans), is attracting more attention, possibly due to improved technologies to investigate its impressive richness. Stijn Demeulenaere, has recorded →
12″ – InFiné
Almost two decades separate us from Cosmos, the last complete work by Fernando Corona, alias Murcof. Corona is a virtuoso of melodic minimalism who has been able to reinterpret the ambient language, giving it a more contemplative →
ensemblepark.com, journal, No. 1, Early Fall 2024, English, 92 pages, USA
With the resurgence of digital literature, possibly fostered by the paradigmatic omnipresence of language models used by AI, there are several new publications to →
Part automated system, part moving image, Nathalie Gebert’s Anthofluid is a sculptural device that generates an ephemeral pictorial proposition at regular intervals. Using medical tubing, the assembly of transparent wafers that form its surface is gradually filled with a purplish →
CD – Karlrecords
Grapefruit was born in 1964 as a self-production by Yoko Ono – just 500 copies were printed by Wunternaum Press. Destined to become one of the most influential texts in the contemporary art circuit of that time, →
