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 + insert card + book – Room40
Produced by Room40, Objects Of Interest is an interesting collaboration between Magda Mayas, a German experimental piano player and Tina Douglas, an Australian multidisciplinary artist. Douglas creates visual scores as a way to →
Edinburgh University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1474474382, English, 212 pages, 2021, UK
Environmental sounds are a key element in understanding our current perception of space. They help our senses to locate our bodies and are used in →
CD – Edition Wandelweiser Records
As the title suggests the starting point for this album is a tree in the town of Kranenburg in Germany. Working with MetaSynth, an audio software programme that can create sound from images, Florian Wittenburg has →
Lisboa Soa, ISBN-13: 978-9899998582, Portuguese, 312 pages, 2021, Portugal
After five editions, the sound art festival Lisboa Soa has published a book documenting its various incarnations and interventions. Public space is the core element of →
LP – Dialogo | Cramps Records
Italian Label Dialogo’s series of reissues from the catalogue of Cramp Records continues with Bird and Person Dyning. Cramp records was one of the most important underground labels in Europe during the 1970s and →
Edinburgh University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1474478823, English, 298 pages, 2021, UK
This book is the result of an extensive research project carried out by the two editors at the Film and TV School of the Academy →
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, →
Parabola Press, English, 180 pages, 2021, UK
Access to the brain and mind is now more possible than ever. Neuroscience has entered mass culture and become popular both through the radical simplification of its findings →
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 →
UCL Press, ISBN-13: 978-1787359765, English, 276 pages, 2021, UK
“Decolonising science is […] to understand that the universal, abstract knowledge Western science has produced […] is only one kind of knowledge among many others that →
