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.
one sided white vinyl LP + poster + insert – Ricerca Sonora
These three algorithmic compositions from newcomer Pier Alfeo and released on the Ricerca Sonora label were made with Wolfram – the programming language of the Mathematica software system, →
CD – Mode Records
This first complete recording of Stries is published by Mode Records, a New York label focusing on contemporary classical music and other forms of avant-garde performance. Stries is a composition for three synthesizers and a tape →
CD + booklet – Crónica
Máquina Magnética are an experimental all-star combo featuring Pedro Tudela, Miguel Carvalhais, Gustavo Costa and Rodrigo Carvalho. Tudela and Carvalhais are known for their project @c and as founders of Crónica, the record label behind →
cassette + folding card box and 4 photo cards – farpoint recordings | K7
The Telepathic Lockdown Tapes is a release from Mick O’Shea and Danny McCarthy, an Irish sound art and improvisation duo formed under the moniker The Quiet →
CD + book – Raster
With the unusual title ‘OpticoAcoustic Oracle’, Greek sound artist and aural experimenter Thanasis Kaprouliasalias, alias Novi_sad, presented an audiovisual project in the ancient city of Olympia on the eve of the flame lighting ceremony for →
CD + book – 1970/Silentes
Following on from his rock-electronic experiments with Meathead and Teho Teardo in the 1990s, Cristiano Deison turned towards even more conceptual and refined experiences by incorporating tape recorders, record players and other objects into his →
CD – Aposiopèse
Recorded, composed and mixed between 2016 and 2020 in French Guiana and France by Thomas Tilly, these recordings are part of a science and art collaboration with herpetologist Antoine Fouquet and follow on from 2018’s Codex Amphibia. →
A simply delightful conversation with Bruce Sterling: 30 topics in 30 minutes (selected from the set of Neural topics). Made possible by Share Festival (thanks to both!)
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Book + plaster – Moozak
Bruchstücke, the fifteenth release on Moozak, is not printed on vinyl, as one would normally expect from a 7″. Instead, each record is different, made in plaster, in different shades of grey and black, resulting →
CD – Crónica
David Lee Myers, the composer of Reduced To A Geometrical Point, is quick to point out that he is not really a fan of “music for meditation”, although he has noticed that some audio constructions seem to →
