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 68, Procedural Rejection + extra: Gaia Guardians zine by Patricia Domínguez . Subscribe now!
Issue #68, Winter 2021 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: Gaia Guardians zine by Patricia Domínguez.
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Onomatopee, ISBN: 978-9493148444, English, 256 pages, 2021, The Netherlands
Forget fantasies of shiny cyborgs or obedient, flawless robots ready to serve human will. The real-life mix of the organic and the artificial in the Anthropocene →
The recent revival of attention to space exploration and the possibility of life on other planets has revived the debate about possible extraterrestrial life forms. FORMATA by Proto-Alien Project (Proto-A), a group consisting of Juan M. Castro and Akihiro Kubota, →
CD – Leaf
Murcof, aka Fernando Corona, returns to his debut label – the Leaf – for the first time in thirteen years, after The Versailles Sessions, the latest album in a full-bodied series of five extended format releases in →
Blank Forms Editions, ISBN: 978-1953691002, English, 398 pages, 2021, USA
This book is a carefully curated selection from the archive of Maryanne Amacher, whose more than one hundred boxes were eventually donated to the New →
The ephemerality of sound art persists in the works of various artists who use this ephemerality in similar ways in other media. “Morphology of the Aerial” by electronic musician and a new media artist Mint Park creates air patterns and →
LP – Verlag System
According to the composer, “the word Armaghedon should no longer be synonymous with destruction’. Instead, he invokes a new “theocratic” world order that promotes unequivocal “neuronal emancipation”. Maurizio Bianchi is a key experimenter and mythical figure →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-1517903268, English, 258 pages, 2020, USA
In Hacked Transmissions, Alessandra Renzi writes about Italian “connective activism”, which involves appropriating and recombining technologies at different levels and in different contexts. →
3 x Vinyl – Axis
“There are many ways to imagine the future”. The techno icon, legendary producer and DJ Jeff Mills is immediately clear on this point. In the past he explored more experimental and artistic forms, often performing →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262039703, English, 400 pages, 2019, USA
The historical transformation that information technology – and software in particular – has brought to almost all human activities has yet to be fully understood. →
CD – Prostir
Cluster Lizard is the alias for collaborations between Dmytro Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka. The duo formed in 2017 and are now on their third release under this moniker. The spark that gave rise to their latest project →
CD + book – Establishment Records
A journey through the icy mountains of the Georgian Greater Caucasus shared by artists variously from Armenia, Germany, and Georgia. This is the premise of Glacier Music II, a refined release produced by Establishment →
CD – Tomoko Mukaiyama Foundation
The first performance of the installation-concert, La Mode, with music by Tomoko Mukaiyama and Yannis Kyriakides, dates back to 2016, on the occasion of the opening of the National Theatre in Taichung, Taiwan. The work →
CD – Denovali
Oliver Doerell, Roger Döring and Alex Stolze, a Belgian-German band known as Dictaphone, present some exotic, cinematic and fascinating atmospheres here. Already on the first track of Goats & Distortions 5, the convincing chords stand out with →
LP – Moozak
The Austrian electronic experimenter Nikos Zachariadis and the French free form turntablist Alexandre Bellenger combined musical skills for this work. The first six tracks on the A side capture our attention with their extreme tonal elaborations, raw →
