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 56, Intelligently Weak + extra: foldable “Impossible Escapes” map and essay by Critical Media Lab. Subscribe now!
Issue #56, Winter 2016 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free foldable “Impossible Escapes” map and essay by →
One of the legends about Saint Francis is that he was able to literally speak to animals and be perfectly understood. The legend describes a dialogue beyond mere empathy and beyond any pretence at recognising the cause and effect of →
CD – Mikroton
This release by the label Mikroton, an artistic platform focused on electronic experimental music and mixed instrumental media, includes different recordings. Some of them were made in a nuclear power plant and some in an old water →
Centre for Contemporary Art Laznia | Polity Press, ISBN-13: 9788361646730, English, Polish, 205 pages, 2016, Poland
Patrick Tresset’s drawing robots (all named “Paul”) have travelled through plenty of exhibitions in the last few years, intriguing the audience (and their egos) →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517900854, English, 359 pages, 2016, USA
This is an eclectic book with a selection of texts by one of the most prolific authors interested in innovation and media. Hugo Gernsback, mostly known for the eponymous →
Béchard Hudon mentions two concepts that inspire his Daily Waverings II installation: the Planck time and the Zero time. The former is the smallest temporal unit (10 elevated -43 seconds), while the latter is a conventional reference to observe any →
CD – Crónica
According to Sengai (1750-1837), a Japanese Buddhist monk famous for his controversial works and lessons, the way of the zen calligrapher showed that painting and the calligraphic arts are ruled by laws, but “the highest law of →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816698912, English, 336 pages, 2016, USA
The inscrutable nature of “digital objects”, which are essentially data but also industrial products, can lead to considering this term as a sort of oxymoron. On the other end, →
Neural #56 extra is a foldable “Impossible Escapes” map developed by the Critical Media Lab at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures / Academy of Art and Design FHNW (only for subscribers to the printed magazine) attached in →
What do we gain or lose by “giving up our social agency to a computer program?” This is the central question of Randomly Generated Social Interactions by Anastasis Germanidis. The resulting project incisively reveals how social exchange survives the →
CD – Sub Rosa
The legendary Pauline Oliveros recently passed away and Four Meditations e Sound Geometries has been one of her last releases: two long suites, more than twenty minutes the first, almost twenty-six the second. The first is →
The MIT Press / ZKM, ISBN: 978-0262034593, English, 432 pages, 2016, USA
In computing, the definition of “reset” is to “bring a system to normal condition or initial state”. As a concept it is connected to the act of “rebooting.” →
The surgical robot first appeared in operating rooms in the mid-eighties and since then has become established as a reliable and necessary presence, enabling more accurate and less invasive interventions for patients and reducing the risk of post-operative infection and →
LP + book – Hornschaft
Alessandro Incorvaia’s Check Out is a project where sounds, images and short verses move following three distinct states, which the author defines as “granularity”. Excess, exposition, death: these are the feelings of the author, but →
Timeless Editions, English, 196 pages anno, France
There are important histories that are written from different authors and scholars and there are important histories that are left to the public memory, never documented or seriously researched. The Staalplaat label has →
