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 69, Climate Resistance . Subscribe now!
Issue #69, Summer 2021 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD + book – Raster
With the unusual title ‘OpticoAcoustic Oracle’, Greek sound artist and aural experimenter Thanasis Kaprouliasalias, alias Novi_sad, presented an audiovisual project in the ancient city of Olympia on the eve of the flame lighting ceremony for →
Domestic altars have existed in various civilisations since ancient times. They are an expression of the need to represent a supernatural, friendly being with whom one can communicate in order to overcome the complexities and absurdities of life. ALTAR-3000 by →
e-flux/University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517909543, English, 341 pages, 2021, USA
Yuk Hui has quietly earned a reputation as one of the most knowledgeable and lucid contemporary philosophers focusing on technology and society. This →
CD + book – 1970/Silentes
Following on from his rock-electronic experiments with Meathead and Teho Teardo in the 1990s, Cristiano Deison turned towards even more conceptual and refined experiences by incorporating tape recorders, record players and other objects into his →
Many women long for pregnancy half their adult lives and spend the other half remembering it with deep emotion. However, the material time of becoming pregnant is a moment full of conflicting emotions that are difficult to deal with both →
Intellect, ISBN-13: 978-1789384956, English, 246 pages, 2021, UK
This is not the catalogue of the homonymous exhibition which took place between 2018 and 2022 at Galerie Charlot in Paris and Tel Aviv, at Watermans in London →
CD – Aposiopèse
Recorded, composed and mixed between 2016 and 2020 in French Guiana and France by Thomas Tilly, these recordings are part of a science and art collaboration with herpetologist Antoine Fouquet and follow on from 2018’s Codex Amphibia. →
A simply delightful conversation with Bruce Sterling: 30 topics in 30 minutes (selected from the set of Neural topics). Made possible by Share Festival (thanks to both!)
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Book + plaster – Moozak
Bruchstücke, the fifteenth release on Moozak, is not printed on vinyl, as one would normally expect from a 7″. Instead, each record is different, made in plaster, in different shades of grey and black, resulting →
CD – Crónica
David Lee Myers, the composer of Reduced To A Geometrical Point, is quick to point out that he is not really a fan of “music for meditation”, although he has noticed that some audio constructions seem to →
Mienophone by Zhe Wang and Daniel Heitz is an installation consisting of a hanging transparent glass sculpture equipped with a camera. When you look into the camera, a machine learning algorithm interprets and categorises the emotions shown by facial expressions. →
LP – BEMIS
In Languages as Art: Documentary History of Broadcasting: 1920-1950 Juanjosé Rivas uses techniques of appropriation, remixing and sampling to extrapolate the sounds and textual sources that form a new critical and auditory construct on the theme of →
English, 40 pages, 2020, Finland
The function of the fanzine has changed from a medium for exchanging information on various levels to a small repository, often embedding a structure and techniques that are functional →
De Gruyter, ISBN: 978-3110670943, English, 304 pages, 2020, Germany
In Retracing Political Dimensions, theorists take a close look at various forms of media art. What almost all contributions seem to have in common is a →
