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 + book – Aagoo
After the audio-video bender happened in between the end of 90s and the first two decades of the new millennium to many contemporary composers, mostly belonging to the most tendentious and conceptual experimental scene, it’s →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517903077, English, 192 pages, 2018, USA
What does Facebook, the social medium with the largest number of users in the world, fear? Mainly one thing: the “mass exodus” from its platform, →
CD – Kvitnu
At first listening, synthetic repetitions and ritual atmospheres, a bit dark and churchy, welcome us, and later gradually become more spatial, vibrating and cosmic. A continuous tremor, as though it was the result of a delirious and →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1-5179-0059-5, English, 472 pages, 2018, USA
Our senses have been through the most drastic redefinition of their functioning since the introduction of electricity. Touch, indeed, has an →
CD – MICL
When we talk about Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, we immediately refer to a classic music universe, highly emotional and tied to an inner space full of shades and tensions, floating between tradition and modernity, daily life and physical places, →
LP – Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre
The album presents two parts on the two different sides, each divided into 4 tracks, all about 5-6 minutes long. The listening starts with the A side, that includes the productions of →
CD – Touch
We have already mentioned the artist, composer and researcher Yann Novak, who in the past released works with different labels such as Murmur, Hibernate, Estuary, his Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Infrequency, Line and Farmacia901. Now it’s the turn →
LP – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French →
LP – Warm
After Sans Cesse in 2016 and Cluzel in 2018, Mathias Delplanque and Guillaume Ollendorff release a new album under the name Ply, as the last one produced by the label Warm. Listening to the first of the →
Cassette – Crónica
There is a Japanese word, 間 (ma), which is not easy to translate. 間 is a negative space, the volume between two parts or structural elements. 間 is an interval, a break, “the simultaneous awareness of form →
