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 57, Propaganda mon amour (co-edited with Andrea Natella). Subscribe now!
Issue #57, Summer 2017 ISSN: 2037-108X
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A line of draped earbud headphones forms a three meter long semi-transparent curtain which divides a gallery space between a sonic interior and exterior. Each headphone outputs different patterns of white noise so that inside the curtain the listener is →
Fancy birthday parties, stunning sunsets, early morning creepy faces, beaches, rooftops, cats and food at will…social networks are literally invaded. About 10% of the worldwide photographic heritage, starting with the first famous Niepce shot of 1826, was shot in the →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822363125, English, 440 pages, 2017, USA
After the predominance of Western culture, perpetrated through mass media in the 20th Century, Englishization has followed as a consequence of global digitalisation. Language has been a barrier, preventing →
LP – Aussenraum
The Aussenraum release is available only in 300 copies on 180g red vinyl with a cover by Flokim Lucas, a Korean-French multidisciplinary artist and at the same time a charming and talented illustrator. Mei Zhiyong is famous →
Latest generation smartphones compete in the market with exceptional performance strokes. That is how these little objects have become the guardians of all our passions; doors open to the near and far world, all in one pocket. With our phones →
MIT Press,ISBN: 978-0262034166, English,408 pages, 2016, USA
Medosch’s ‘New Tendencies’ book was the peak of his long-term research on this crucial artistic movement, originated and centred in Zagreb in the early sixties, and among the first to reflect on →
six sound cards – not on label
The “substance” of this release is not just metaphorical: the package of Vingt is as big as some deluxe collection boxes. All the six paper boxes are differently colored and apparently include →
In the movie “The Little Mermaid” the powerful King Triton is protective and authoritarian towards his daughter Ariel; while she, like any teenager, has a strong desire to go beyond impositions. Her curiosity obviously falls into what is most banned: →
MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262035064, English, 376 pages, 2017, USA
Those familiar with Andreas Broeckmann’s work, first at V2 Rotterdam, and after, as Transmediale artistic director, can recognise in this text various parts of his long-standing, personal investigation into ‘machinic’ art. →
CD – Room40
When we talk about sound-art, we know already that the images recalled are typically dystopian and inspired by a generic criticism of hyper-liberist and globalized society and this work also follows this pattern. Lawrence English is an →
Since pioneering net art works like Olia Lialina/Márton Fernezelyi’s ‘Agatha Appears’ (where the protagonists seemingly remains in the same place, but actually she jumps from one website to another, noticeable only through the URL address appearing on the screen), the →
Vitra Design Museum, MAK, ISBN-13: 978-3945852118, English, 328 pages, 2017, Germany
Programmatically avoiding the lavish newness in technology design, this catalogue of the ‘Hello, Robot.’ exhibition revolves around our relationship with autonomous tech, beyond the omni-comprehensive effort of the show, →
CD + 24 pages booklet – Immediata
This is a project achieved in 2014 for the 40th Anniversary of Synergy Percussion, the oldest and most acclaimed Australian ensemble of Contemporary Music of Western Tradition. For this event, the two electroacoustic →
Some media look back at their distant original history to what has been lost, or become unavailable. With our post-digital facilities to digitise and reconstruct, it’s relatively easy then to revive and repurpose this specific media in our hybrid worlds. →
