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 →
CD – Mego
Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Arto Lindsay, Joe Talia, Ricardo Villalobos and Keith Fullerton Whitman create a special and unconventional collaboration, pervaded by repetitive rhythms. In our opinion, Villalobos may be the rhythm connector: a Chilean →
As a format, the digital portrait poses many different questions about self-representation, most of them related to the ephemeral nature of digital matter. A potential yet perennial changeability gives it the special quality of being an abstract more than an →
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN: 978-0988937543, English, 112 pages, 2016, Germany
Jason Kahn (see the interview in Neural #55) is a sound artist who has spent a good deal of time investigating what he calls “active listening” practices, raising the awareness →
CD – Touch
Brian Williams, aka Lustmord – a veteran of dark ambient scenes and member of the industrial combo SPK – has for the first time published a solo album under his own name with Touch Music, an old →
Emotions are the last bastion of humanity when it comes to machines. But what we feel deeply is usually not being autonomously perceived by machines themselves, so what if we consider a reverse logic, and use machines to better express →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262034753, English, 952 pages, 2016, USA
Recognising the process of interaction as fundamentally an exchange is what the editors of this sizeable anthology do. Their criteria are summarised in the title itself, as “practicable” (derived from the →
2LP – Aussenraum
Active since 2006 and based in Lausanne, the ensemBle baBel is a group of musicians which has already worked with Christian Marclay. In 2012 the band played four works by the composer. In his musical attitude, the →
Computer software with increasing learning and problem-solving capabilities is being rapidly integrated into the background of our lives, monitoring many of our daily moves to make our lives easier and safer, from managing our emails to driving our cars. In →
Sound Development, ISBN: 978-8480265393, English, 263 pages, 2016, Switzerland
This is another expedition organised by Sound Development, and another thirteen sound artists, landing this time in Belgrade and Athens, two very symbolic cities for current times. This printed and, →
LP – D’Autres Cordes
Electronics, electroacoustics, noise and contemporary music: this is the special mix created by Franck Vigroux in Rapport Sur Le Désordre. This production includes four tracks per side and is an ideal prosecution of Centaure, an audio-visual →
The use of industrial robots in art usually takes advantage of the powerful aesthetic values transmitted by their sheer force, usually mediated by an alien mechanic elegance. In installations, they’re protected from the audience for security reasons, and that just →
Gruenrekorder, ISBN 978-3-00-052370-0, Huao, Basque, Spanish and English, 176 pages, 2016, Germany
In the product page on the label’s website the description of this release ends with this warning: “Partially legible. Sunlight reading recommended”. It’s hard to fail recognising that →
CD + DVD + book – Unsounds
Anne-James Chaton, Thurston Moore and Andy Moor have worked together for this release, whose artwork cannot remain indifferent. On the cover is printed the title of the project, Heretics. While opening the hardback, →
Earnings, concentration, effectiveness, well-being. Is not this what chases the western culture? Are these not the bases around which revolve the lives of hundreds of thousands of people? And while phones, home automation devices and cars are becoming more intelligent, →
