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 – Unsounds
Italian composer and performer Alessandro Bosetti and Australian pianist Chris Abrahams have collaborated on A Heart That Responds From Schooling, a refined work that outlines hypnotic, abrasive melodies in a digitally domesticated setting of spectral atmospheres. Bordering →
Neural 50, Transient Gestures. Subscribe now!
Issue #50, Winter 2015 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN: 978-1623565091, English, 216 pages, 2014, UK
Sound is unquestionably about space; being present where vibrations are induced, and time; the exact moment when this is happening. But the act of “hearing” is a way more multifaceted →
7” – Corvo
Alessandra Eramo is a singer, performer and sound-artist born in Taranto, Puglia, but now based in Berlin. Her experimental attitude is intertwined with a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional avant-garde, exploring relationships between voice and text in →
The Magnetophone, by Croatian artist Hrvoje Hiršl, consists of a rectangular metal frame housing 12 magnetic play/record heads and a system of wheels which drives a magnetic tape around a closed circuit. The tape heads randomly play or record onto →
CD – Baskaru
Calibrated Contingency began life as a live improvisation held in Graz in 2011. The duo’s performance involved speakers positioned in a straight line facing the audience, with the artists separated from each other by a wall – →
William Heinemann, ISBN-13: 978-0434023158, English,, 320 pages, 2014, UK
In the early public era of the Internet (the second half of the nineties), the dream of finally having a horizontal medium, enabling many-to-many communication, free from censorships and time/space/money constraints →
CD – Herbal International
Gregory Büttner recorded Pochen in March of 2011 at the PAF (Performance Arts Forum) in St Erme, 150 km North-east of Paris, France. PAF, founded in 2006, is a space dedicated to the performing arts, be →
The parametric loudspeaker, commonly referred to as an “audio spotlight” (from the name of the product that popularized the technology), has been one of the most discussed audio innovations in recent years. It is based on the principle of acoustic →
CD – Dragon’s Eye
Flowing and melodic sounds, along with more abstract and obscure iterations, drones, ticks, elegiac airs and ancestral dirges overlay organic field recordings with elaborate and dense structures characterise Over Inland. Together, composers Lawrence Inglese and Stephen →
