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.
The social black hole where all the electronic waste is left to poison the environment is one of the most cowardly and paradoxical situations created by western industries. “Rare Earthenware” by Unknown Fields Division (in collaboration with Kevin Callaghan) is →
CD – Touch
Heitor Alvelos boasts an unconventional artistic background. A long-term collaborator with Touch, he has also designed and implemented stage visuals for Biosphere, Fennesz, BJNilsen, Rafael Toral and Philip Jeck, as well as producing sounds under the various →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-0857856616, English, 232 pages, 2014, UK
Vinyl is one of the oldest living media, with an intriguing mixture of tactility, sound quality and visual appeal. After loads of books about compulsory collecting, record fetish and the worshipping →
The ubiquitousness of social networks and their massive number of users makes them the most popular online platform ever realised. But the level of authority control over such platforms is also massive even if its not particularly perceived by users. →
CD + booklet – Acte
This composition by Gabriel Ledoux is accompanied by a 60-page booklet that features pop artwork by Gabriel Jasmin and texts by six different authors. The music immediately pushes towards a particular climax, associating traditional structures →
RIXC, LiepU MPLab, ISBN-13: 978-9934843419, English, 312 pages, 2014, Latvia
In its journal format, Acoustic Space dedicates a second volume to “Techno-ecologies” continuing a strong ongoing interest in the relationships between art, technology and science. RIXC founders’ Smite and Smits →
Commissioned by UKArts.org, The Cutting Room, and the Phoenix Cultural Centre for the centenary of the First World War, The Crystal Line is the latest work by the engineer, critic and multimedia artist Julian Oliver. This “crystal radio 2.0” was →
Limited 24 Hour USB Flash Drive Edition – Bandcamp
A single phrase of an old jazz record is split into three differen audio streams, sounds that using generative concatenations are processed in cycles which then produce harmonic sequences and tonal →
Oxford University Press, ISBN: 9780199347841, English, 336 pages, 2014, USA
In a contemporary mediascape where the “non-visual” still seems to be a privileged category, the acousmatic as “the experience of hearing a sound without seeing its cause” is a relevant →
The beauty of mechanics seems to have conquered the minds of a number of new media artists. The electronic music scene, often blamed for being “static” in its prevalent use of machines with knobs and buttons has created some extraordinary →
