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 64, Post-Growth + extra: Post-Growth Toolkit by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. Subscribe now!
Issue #64, Autumn 2019 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: Post-Growth Toolkit by Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska.
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Custom electronic music instruments have a tradition that largely stems from DIY techniques, taking a functional more than formal approach, with hardware components usually very visible in the final release. Love Hultén’s “Evoboxx” defies these expectations. Officially described as a →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501313868, English, 304 pages, 2019, UK
As a young boy the poet Rilke explored phonoautography, where sound waves produced mechanical etchings on a surface that could be subsequently played back. He wondered →
CD – Consumer Waste
Constant Linear Velocity by Stephen Conford is a project made in 2016 for Color Out of Space, an unconventional art and sound experimental festival that has taken place in Brighton for the past ten years. It →
Cesar & Lois define their “Degenerative Cultures” artwork as a ‘bhiobrid’ (bio-digital hybrid), whose aim is to criticise our endless appetite for control over nature. This installation features a printed book on this topic, which is slowly being eaten by →
Pluto Press, ISBN-13: 978-0745335346, English, 208 pages, 2019, UK
Eight years after the publication of “@ is For Activism” comes Joss Hands’ new monograph, dedicated to understanding and elaborating on the role of the gadget. →
CD 10” – COdA
The Italian musician Imok hails from Cisterna, a hamlet of Coseano, a town twenty kilometres from Udine located deep in the Fruili Province. The electroacoustic composer is known for his experimental approach and in particular for →
Neural #64 extra is an intervention by artists Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska. Their ‘Post-Growth Toolkit’ is made of an embroidered patch, sampling a graph of world energy consumption (1800-2017) continued by a post-growth scenario, plus a text introducing →
We need oxygen. We need it for most of our vital activities, including digesting, moving and thinking. And we get oxygen from the fundamental act of breathing, along with plenty of other substances. The natural basic functioning of nature is →
MIT Press, SBN-13: 978-0262038843, English, 208 pages, 2018, USA
Many aspects of the 1980s are pivotal to an understanding of our technological present. The first digital presence in private spaces took place at this time, and →
LP – Persistence Of Sound
The Eccentric Press by Iain Chambers is a project commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk Köln and ABC Radio National/Australia. The former is a local public radio broadcaster of the German Land North-Rhine Westphalia, the latter is →
Blind Landing is an interactive installation by the artist Jooyoung Oh. It is composed of a helmet that tracks brain waves and eye movements, and artificial intelligence software that analyzes the forms of the video frames. When the helmet is →
Wiley, ISBN-13: 978-1119453017, English, 136 pages, 2019, UK
This issue of AD is a timely one and a visual feast to understand an ‘architecture without people’ which is “made for and by our machines”, in Young’s →
LP – FRAC Franche-Comté
The source of Dictaphones by Charles Pennequin is a huge archive of mini-tapes, which includes recordings of readings, monologues, voices and several experiments of sound poetry, some of them still unreleased but carefully preserved over more →
AI now plays a decisive role in contemporary image making, both as the perceived ‘new dimension’ of visual culture, and as an engine that allows us to edit and produce new parafictions. Artist Trevor Paglen and AI researcher Kate Crawford →
