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.
Routledge, ISBN 978-1003172789, English, 210 pages, 2022, UK
Andrés Burbano is undoubtedly one of the most important scholars in the field of Latin American media art and history and has dedicated many years to the research →
CD – Farpoint
“For intelligent machines to work, we must reduce the world into numerical data sets that support databases and algorithmic operations”, claims Arash Akbari. He expands on this by underlining that the physical world is often forgotten in →
CD – Touch
One of the subgenres of field recording that is probably most appreciated by audiences not accustomed to the practice, is audio diaries, sound works where the artist’s experiences in specific places are documented. Audio diaries are a →
Verso, ISBN 978-1839764554, English, 236 pages, 2023, UK
There is an economic model that we see as irreversible, celebrated above all by American corporations: the ‘single-entrepreneur heroism’ with a technology company whose profits grow geometrically →
4CD – True Blanking
These four CDs are the result of three years of collaborative work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and drummer Chris Cogburn. The duo decided to explore the differences between the resonance frequencies and harmonics of material →
vinyl LP – Staalplaat
When we talk about simulation in the field of contemporary audio experimentation and the complex relationship between analogue and digital, it is usually more common for it to be within the context of digital technology being →
2CD – Col Legno
This is the third release from an interesting research project at the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at Zurich University of the Arts (ICST). For this project, various electroacoustic works created from the →
Transcript Verlag, ISBN 978-3837657005, English, 360 pages, 2023, Germany
There is a hyper-fragmentation of media in the digital world, from the news reduced to tweeted titles to the average 42-second videos on TikTok. The →
LP – Kohlhaas
With only one track on the A-side, ‘Radicor al flort, espert’, which lasts just over eleven minutes, and one on the B-side, ‘on’ill il erb, aor Raetia’ coming in around the eight-and-a-half-minute mark, the definition of long →
LP – Die Schachtel
After six years of silence, Claudio Rocchetti is back with a new album on Die Schachtel, marking the fifth release from the label’s ‘Decay Music’ series. The composer, performer and publisher from Bolzano (Italy) but currently →
