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.
CD – Denovali
The versatile Robin Schlochtermeier, a composer, sound designer and musician with a background in classical music who often works for cinema and tv productions, returns on Denovali after two EPs, one released in 2017 and another in →
CD – Ici d’ailleurs
Geins’t Naït & L. Petitgand’s performances are mysterious and disturbing settings, imbued with melodic constructions and electronic layers, often dense with industrial references, overlaid with dreamy voices and cinematic arrangements. Here the post-industrial tensions of Geins’t →
2LP – Edizioni Periferia
Andy Guhl’s career as an improvisational musician went from strength to strength in the 1970s but it wasn’t until 1983 that the Swiss experimenter and architect stopped using any traditional instruments in order to embrace electronic →
vinyl + magazine – MOAB
A result of an accurate selection of tracks from different recordings of concerts and rehearsals, Ways To Prepare Pets For War by Otomax follows a specific rule: all the improvisations are set to an overall →
CD – Bocian
Anthony Pateras established an electroacoustic group with seven members for the project Musica Sanae, developed with the Creative Victoria Creator’s Fund. The result is Pseudacusis, a work executed in 2019 in Naples, Sokolowsko, Berlin and Krakow. Krakow →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262539302, English, 312 pages, 2020, USA
How much do we still value autonomous “choice” in music? With streaming as the dominant model of listening and the addictive combination of a very →
CD – Chant Records
When two improvisational singers have the opportunity to meld techniques and approaches to performance, they are able to recreate their own art, triggering a new language of musical invention and spiritual connections. This is exactly what →
Spector Books, ISBN-13: 978-3944669793, English, 560 pages, 2021, Germany
Ten Cities is a hefty book that narrates all the research emerging from a collaborative music project led by Goethe-Institut from 2012 to 2014. The project →
LP – Unsounds
Yannis Kyriakides is a Cyprus-born composer and sound artist (born in 1969), who emigrated to the UK in his early teens and then, after turning twenty, moved permanently to Amsterdam, where he now lives and works. Throughout →
Komma, Uitgeverij, ISBN-13: 978-9083065502, English, 224 pages, 2020, The Netherlands
Overlap – The no man’s land between art and science has a structure that is conceptually similar to that of a classical almanac, a popular →
