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 – Ad Noiseam
Iterated and minimal melodic micro-sequences, drones that evolve in dilated atmospheres, ambient textures and reverberations veined by a gloomy psychedelic allure, deep frequencies that cross the melancholic articulations of →
CD + dvd C0C0S0L1DC1T1
The beginning of the first video works by Julio Soto, ‘The Possibility Of Utopia’, looks like taken from Peter Cook’s radical project ‘Plug City’ or from another →
CD – Pogus
Do you remember the talkbox? It was an effect from the Sixties that distorted the sound of a guitar like a wah-wah pedal or a robotic voice (the result →
In a special edition of El Pais Digital reporting the Arco festival in 2001, the Spanish artist Ricardo Iglesias, one of the net art pioneers in his country, said →
CD – Hibari
“How can you believe everything they tell you?”, this is the first text line after the beats, tapped on the table, or a keyboard or whatever in ‘Computer Music/Post Fordism’, →
dvd – RIXC
Using for artistic purposes a radio-telescope, active during the cold war as an important technological articulation of the Soviet military power, stands out as one of the few cases in →
CD – Minus Habens/Family Affair
Electronic and acoustic sounds, evolving here in an intimate way, with lyrical transitions and juxtaposed field recordings plus improvisational attitudes. All of the above placed into →
miniCD – Korm Plastics
This is a reworking of the first Kapotte Muziek workshop (and live concert) held in September 1997. Originally it was the Frans de Waard studio project, based on →
Throughout the twentieth century western society was dominated by the machine. The fascination artists held for the beauty and power of mechanical processes established an enduring dialogue between creativity and technology. Many contemporary →
CD – Adnoiseam / Goodfellas
Breakcore generates hybrid fruits, developed from the insertion of very dissimilar sensibilities, that, for instance, produce this ‘art noveau’ artwork. The Adnoiseam experts prepared all these sounds →
