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.
LP – Nebularosa
Can the lullaby as a genre serve as guiding idea for an experimental electronic music project? Obviously yes, and it is no mystery that lullabies could be found in almost every culture from ancient times to the present day and have featured in avant-garde and even postmodern compositions. The open call for experimental lullabies was launched in May 2014 by the new London-based record label Nebularosa. and there have a number of collaborations, with compositions for Nintendo, Atari, Pure Data, Supercollider, D-Box or simply for tape recorders, as well as artists who have used ultra Stethoscopes or radioactive materials. These remind us that the lullaby is a powerful example of consciousness-altering music. Nebulullab An Interstellar Cloud Of Dust includes five tracks on vinyl. These are by 0xA and Erich Barganier on side A and d. R. and. G. S, Samuel Hertz and xname (Eleonora Oreggia) on the back side. More artists were added to the digital edition, including Thor Magnusson, Repl Electric, Victor Zappi, Adrian Carter, Claude Heiland-Allen, Jason David Snow, Robert B . Lisek and Marta Zapparoli. All are experimenters who have a clear awareness that the repetition in lullabies induces variations in the brain state, favouring transition between waking and sleep, or the oscillation in their liminal threshold. This recalls a pre-human state where the refrain becomes a mechanism of association: it brings together forces, ideas, memories, powers we did not know we had. The Nebularosa crew has also led a workshop on the field of lullabies and altered states of consciousness. This was held by Eleonora Oreggia, a seminal interdisciplinary artist and independent researcher born in Milan. Oreggia is the label head honcho and has delivered a sort of fine basic guide available for aesthetics, electronics, circuit design, physical computing (Arduino, Beaglebone, Gumstix) and software programming (Java, C/C++, PD) as well as DSP. All this finally resulted in a joyful launch party, ten hours of experimental music with children and adults listening together.
VVAA – Nebulullaby An Interstellar Cloud Of Dust
