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 75, Artificial Corporeality (co-edited with Zane Cerpina) + extra: a postcard pointing to an AR extension of the artwork Ejector by Tim Høibjerg . Subscribe now!
Issue #75, 2024 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free →
Le Chant du Moineau, ISBN 978-2955947579, French/English, 132 pages, 2022, France
Méandre(s) took place from the 24th to the 26th of June, 2021, initiated by the ‘improvisation society’ Le Un, which brought together artists, intellectuals and →
cassette – Les Intérêts Spécifiques
Financial trading and affairs permeate all parts of society, influencing every area of human relations through schemes, tactics, and often criminal strategies. There are approximately 12,000 billion dollars hidden in tax havens, claim RYBN, a →
The inner generative properties of literature can be found in various works, such as the exemplary “Cent mille milliards de poèmes” by Raymond Queneau, which is created by cutting up pages. Richard Vijgen’s The Case for a Small Language Model →
Goldsmiths Press, ISBN 978-1913380564, English, 320 pages, 2023, UK
The multifaceted life of Ernst Schoen (1894–1960) can be symbolically linked to the cultural oppression of the emerging totalitarian governments in the first half of the 20th →
3 x vinyl + booklet – Code
Accompanied by a 12-page booklet, featuring a written contribution from Etienne Menu along with a series of explanatory texts introducing each individual work, this triple vinyl release from Jérémie Arcache and Leonardo Ortega, →
The port has been, since ancient history, a recognized symbol of the expansion and commercial power of a country. A source of trade and a crossroads of communications, the port has historically favored the development of civilizations. Port cities have →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262547420, English, 242 pages, 2024, USA
If the algorithmic automation mechanisms that industry has implemented over the years have severely conditioned the lives and work of countless people, rebalancing these imposed →
cassette – LOM
Robotic Folk is a solo project by the Lithuanian composer Jonas Jurkūnas, who with Volume One, has created a visionary work with many dystopian twists, which – long after the end of our current society – prefigures →
Panoramas (360-degree paintings from the late 19th century) are considered the forerunners of today’s immersive environments. Timothy Thomasson’s system in I’m Feeling Lucky, remodulates this original medium. A large curved screen shows 3D landscapes calculated in a game engine and →
Arts Formation / Waag / Fact / Transmediale, English, 320 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
Art practice consists not only of creation, exhibition, criticism and documentation. In artistic uses of media, there has always been a need to share knowledge →
CD – ARMComm Rizosfera Europe
It has taken twenty-eight years for this second album to arrive from Psychophysicist – the psychoacoustic project of Adi Newton, the charismatic frontman of seminal, cyberpunk group Clock DVA. The multi-instrumentalist and now electronic →
The work FM-TOTEM by Dmitry Morozov, aka ::vtol::, is reminiscent of the tall, slender silhouette of totems, those mystical objects that evoke a deep, ancestral symbolism. This choice may have been made in honour of the technology on which it →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262546836, English, 288 pages, 2023, USA
‘The distinction between image capture and image creation is now increasingly blurred’, writes Joanna Zylinska in the introduction to The Perception Machine. This is already →
CD – Unsounds
Phill Niblock passed away in January 2024 at the age of ninety. It was a tremendous loss for all fans of audio art and experimental music. The minimalist composer had been active since the mid-sixties, and lived →
