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.
OEI, magazine, ISBN 978-9188829146, English, 366 pages, 2023, Sweden
This is a double issue of OEI magazine edited by Michael Nardone, a poet and editor who explores the aesthetics of language and the materiality of →
CD – Constellation Records
In recent years the entire international artistic community – and musicians in particular – have been harmed by the pandemic. But in some situations the response has been a greater commitment, as though the isolation imposed →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262044936, English, 344 pages, 2023, USA
The liberating spirit of DIY (Do It Yourself) is certainly not new, neither in culture nor in art, but it has been interpreted and, above →
CD – Raster
The dystopia of Blade Runner, Polaroid colours, neon lights, and the aesthetics of the VHS video recorder (in French Magnétoscope), are the conceptual foundations of the French master’s latest work, released on the raster label. Today’s world →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262047470, English, 284 pages, 2022, USA
The famous Shannon-Weaver model revealed noise as a crucial disturbance in a communication channel. The role of noise now seems to have been replaced by →
CD – Not On Label
W Piwnicy (in Polish) or στο υπόγειο in Greek, is the result of several studio sessions in 2016 in Paris. The release was self-produced by the two artists in an edition of 300 glass-mastered →
V2, ISBN 978-908289355, English, 128 pages, 2022, The Netherlands
If, as Carvalhais claims, works of art are no longer representational but rather ‘processes’, then calculation in art is consequently a crucial element. In this book, →
CD – empreintes DIGITALes
The notion of docu-fiction is central to the approach that Yves Daoust has taken in recent years, both to acousmatics and to what is sometimes called ‘mixed music’, a term used to describe compositions with both →
CD – Eich
The large number of twenty tracks compose “Black, Pink and Yellow noises”, an album made in partnership by the French artists Marc Baron and Jean-Philippe Gross. The first is an alto saxophonist we remember in pair with →
Onomatopee, ISBN 978-9493148864, English, 158 pages, 2022, The Netherlands
At Neural we still have a number of floppy discs, most of which surprisingly still work (the most important files were backed up a →
