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 63, Surveillance Surveyed. Subscribe now!
Issue #63, Summer 2019 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD – Aagoo
Israel Martínez is a Mexican sound artist based in Guadalajara, who always expresses an intense and critical social-political activism. This is strongly influenced by the context he lives in, a reality full of simple and daily events →
CD – New Domain
According to Science, sound waves cannot transmit in a vacuum. Even the sun’s auditory emissions cannot reach us because of the absence of vibrational phenomena. In this project the multimedia artist Jeff Talman collaborated with Dr. →
CD – Unseen Worlds
Laurie Spiegel, who in 1980 had already released her first LP The Expanding Universe, is a pioneer of computer music. She made her work with software tools for algorithmic composition. Her “Music Mouse: An Intelligent →
In the first seconds of Beyond Symphony, a continuous piercing sound of unknown origin saturates the listener. The author of this 75 minute piece is Julien Ottavi, a French sound artist, programmer, composer, musician, poet and experimental filmmaker. His creative →
CD – MIC Lithuania
This selection of young composers edited by Edvardas Šumila for the Music Information Centre Lithuania is particularly interesting in a historical-political moment when different factions question the idea of “open borders”. In some countries, especially in →
CD – PNL
Since 2002 Paal Nilssen-Love on drums and Ken Vandermark on reeds have published seven albums of improvisational music. In addition, they have often worked with other great colleagues such as Peter Brötzmann, Terrie Hessels, Andy Moor and →
2CD – Two Acorns
The word #谢 谢 #(Xièxie) is composed of two Chinese characters, which translate to “thank you”, perhaps a simple homage to the people the artist Will Long met on a trip from Shanghai to Hangzhou in →
CD – Moloko Plus
Modernist music, with its aesthetic-philosophical references to interior design and architecture, should not only be included in easy listening, lounge or exotica compilations. The real post-war sound has been much more experimental than four easy listening →
LP – Edition Telemark
Sounds and visual arts, installations and performances. William Engelen is native to the Limburg region but lives and works in Berlin. After Partitur Belval, he developed his second LP, a double album for Edition Telemark named →
CD – Swarming
The hyperrealistic artwork with a twelve page elegant booklet immediately grabs our attention. Friche: Transition is the first collaborative project of Eamon Sprod and Eric La Casa.. Sprod is an Australian sound artist working for almost two →
2CD – XI
Cecilia Lopez is an Argentinian composer, musician and multimedia artist. She habitually makes engaging and delicate sound explorations, here realised through overlapping layers and with the use of small speakers and contact microphones. In Red the →
LP – Fragment Factory
Suffering For The Promised is a sound project developed by Stefan Roigk over the past 14 years. During this time, he has faced some joys, yieldings, reprises and new versions, and experienced moments when he wasn’t →
CD – Crónica
What happens when some instrumentalists, vocalists, researchers, sound artists, programmers and a philosopher join together to experiment with new techniques of musical interaction? Trondheim EMP is a thirty strong member’s collective that decided to uses auditory analysis →
The world has changed many times along with its inhabitants. Inhabitants who are a bit ungrateful, if we look at ourselves in the mirror. We have evolved, built, destroyed and … polluted, polluted a lot. We even polluted while cleaning: →
