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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LP – PAN
Are there worlds that are worthy of exploration beyond our own? In response to this enigmatic question, Jenna Sutela answers with some recordings from a hypothetical Martian language, visions of neural nets and synthetics and alien sounds. →
Although the Swiss landscapes are known throughout the world for their uncontaminated beauty, in reality they are supported by artificial infrastructures that have shaped these natural environments for decades: dams, tunnels, protection nets, irrigation systems, snow cannons and many other →
Društvo Galerija Boks / MG+MSUM / Projekt Atol, ISSN 2335-4232, English, 275 pages, 20’19, Slovenia
Printed publications are expanding their role as they develop and stabilise other cultural forms. This includes the ‘augmented catalogue’ →
5 CD Box – Spazio di Hausdorff
Sifting through the experiments of the 1980s and 1990s underground cassette scene, Spazio du Hausdorff has released an elegant box-set anthology dedicated to Enrico Piva. Piva was a sophisticated, passionate and well-read →
Similar to what Philip Dick told us in 1956, in Minority Report, our ‘smart cities’ are now trying to become “safe cities”. There are a lot of IT companies already working with the various military forces, creating mapping systems that →
Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Italian, 600 pages, 2019, Italy
There is a body of early work from early activists, sociologists and philosophers who engaged with the sociotechnical impact of information technology just →
CD – Transacoustic Research
What role does spoken language play in the age of the pervasive electronic surveillance? Darkvoice is an album and collection of videos questioning this theme. Specifically, Jörg Piringer tries to focus on an electronic cipher, a →
CD – Errant Bodies
For this sound project, Antje Vowinckel has carefully recorded many monologues and dialogues. These vocal expressions were partially reproduced by the author along with two experimental musicians, Marc Sabat and Serge Baghdassarians. The selected audio recordings →
The spectacle of science and technology is sometimes used by artists to divert and use an audience’s attention. This is the case with ’VOLTA’ by Yann Leguay, which exploits the ‘plasma speaker’ technique (a variation of Tesla coil speakers), using →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9462982161, English, 238 pages, 2019, The Netherlands
While media archeology discourse is now moving in different directions, its practical implications are more present now than ever. This collection builds →
LP – Avatar Quebec
Fluff is produced by Avatar Quebec and is the latest outcome of a collaboration between multimedia artist Marla Hlady and guitarist, singer and composer Eric Chenaux. The duo works on experimentations defined as field-performance-recordings. The →
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 →
