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.
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Issue #59, Winter 2018 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Verso, ISBN-13: 978-1786632432, English, 256 pages, 2017, UK
Steyerl is equally an acknowledged artist and a skilled writer, which is quite a rare combination of qualities, especially if accompanied by a lucid and forthright attitude →
“Playing God” is a classic artist strategy which can be used to mask the rising sense of frustration for our current ecological crisis. Conceiving and implementing functional systems that reconfigure how nature works, instantly show the precariousness of our interventions, →
2CD – Gruenrekorder
Christina Kubisch and Annea Lockwood met each other in a different age. It was around 1975 and the New York experimental music scene wasn’t as internationally recognized, but both artists already had solid backgrounds. Christina Kubisch had →
Revolver Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-3957633910, English, 362 pages, 2018, Austria
In a history of media art social organisations, the Time’s Up collective deserves a special place. Founded in Linz by people leaving the activist space Stadtwerkstatt, →
Artificial Intelligence has found its place in the hearts of artists and designers much more than it seems to have done in the average population. The “living machine” has become a place of illusion in confidence and disillusion when the →
CD – Opa Loka
This release seems to be under the influence of an immanent turmoil, as in Stranger Things, the American TV show created by Matt and Ross Duffero, or in “Dark”, another classic of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. The →
Valiz, ISBN-13: 978-9492095268, English, 304 pages, 2017, The Netherlands
Fate and the notion of archive is at the core of an increasingly visible debate, triggered by art institutions’ involvement in the global digitalisation of →
Wind can modify the hearing of a spoken voice, due to the faster movement of the air. Carrying air molecules faster, it can generate accidental sounds, also propagating our voice far away or only near, depending on its direction. Fluisterende →
CD – Monotype Records
Under the Monotype Records brand (it is exactly their ninety third release) Christian Kobi collects for the occasion three compositions on tenor sax, one on soprano sax and for the fifth (the central in the album) →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190226992, English, 712 pages, 2018, UK
Even arguably stemming from concepts like “generative” and “automatic” what is exactly meant by “Algorithmic Music” ? The two editors of this sumptuous anthology give a →
Imagined technologies from the past, especially those formulated as fantastic tales, can be compared to many prototypes assembled in the 20th century and never produced. Artist Tania Candiani has investigated an Indian text (Vaimanika Shastra) on aerospace technology, mentioning “Vimana” →
CD – Kontrans
Produced by Kontrans, Tomomi Adachi and Jaap Blonk are extraordinary improvisation experimenters, two real specialists in the interaction between voice and electronics. In a video released in 2013, the Japanese artist shows his actions with the simple →
Luiz Zanotello thinks that interpreting differences and establishing boundaries is generating “spatial anxieties” especially because we are prone to a technological mediation which is accentuating our increasing uncertainty. He interprets then these feelings in his installation “The Aerographer”, measuring the →
Even if we don’t know or notice it, our whole society is the product of methodologies introduced in the early twentieth century, mainly Fordism and Taylorism, conceived to optimise industrial production, scientifically increasing the efficiency of workers. “Tempo Tempo” is →
