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 62, Spiked Pieces + extra: 25th anniversary cover sticker. Subscribe now!
Issue #62, Winter 2018 ISSN: 2037-108X
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The world has changed many times along with its inhabitants. Inhabitants who are a bit ungrateful, if we look at ourselves in the mirror. We have evolved, built, destroyed and … polluted, polluted a lot. We even polluted while cleaning: →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1478001454, English, 312 pages, 2019, USA
The strenuous task of defining ethereal ‘sound’ as an ‘object’ can be compared to Yuk Hui’s effort to outline ‘digital objects’. The formulation of a →
LP – SVS
Crocodile by Munich born Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, aka BELP, demonstrates a refined and niche electronics, hovering between radical experimentalism and rhythmical musicality. Founded by Benedikt Brachtel and Daniel Hermann-Collini in 2013 and focused on the organisation of artistic →
The introduction of custom machines into performance art has been well-established since the early 20th century, an extension of communication that anticipated cybernetic extensions of the body. During the 1990s, in particular, performative groups labeled as ‘cyberpunk’ like La Fura →
Shelter Press, INA GRM, ISBN-13: 978-2365820318, English, French, 228 pages, 2019, France
There’s bravery in starting a new printed periodical publication on experimental sound, even in a manageable paperback book format. ‘Spectres’ is a small →
CD – Kvitnu
After Big Space Adventure, a double LP published in 2018 for Private Persons, the sound artist Dmitriy Avksentiev, aka Voin Oruwu, now releases ten new futuristic tracks for the label Kvitnu by Dmytro Fedorenko and Kateryna →
Red Lines is a considerable project by Evan Roth, assembled through multiple trips around the world, to places where the communication cables emerge from the sea. His pilgrimage has produced 53 individual network located videos, shot in 8 countries on →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038270, English, 280 pages, 2018, USA
Weather has a special place at the intersection of art and science, from picturing it as a vigorous, elemental aesthetic that has inspired countless →
CD – Elli
In all its many different connotations, silence has always been a theme that is deeply engaging to avant-garde musicians both in the development of theories and artistic approaches. To some of them, silence seems to be an →
In the art installation “Labor“, Paul Vanouse makes a system that re-creates the scent of people sweating in stressful conditions. The bacteria involved are placed in three glass bioreactors. These produce the primary scents, which are then merged in a →
Re:Voir, Blu-Ray/DVD + book, English, 2019, France
Joost Rekveld is one of the few artists who seamlessly integrates various scientific fields in his film practice. This selection of his movies is meant to be his →
CD – Arteksounds
With a tremendous scenic impact modulated between extreme vocals, audio experimentation and performance art, Stephanie Pan presents Have Robot Dog, Will Travel. This project is also supported by Ensemble Klang at the Festival Dag in de Branding, →
The borders between stage, exhibition space and performative extended space have blurred in recent years, becoming increasingly liquid. The Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret has assembled an audiovisual performance that wholly proves this concept. In “HANNAH”, the whole space is conceived →
Springer, ISBN-13: 978-3319710389, English, 214 pages, 2019, Switzerland
One of the most fascinating promises of the early networked media was the possibility for collective, simultaneous collaboration by users in geographically discrete spaces. Something that →
