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.
Shitkatapult,
CD+DVD
, Strike134, 2011
It took a decade to Markus Popp/Oval to return and release another album (“O”) which radically changed its approach towards more classical sounds (with drums, guitar and →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262017459, 272 pages, 2012, English
Howard Rheingold has already proved himself a one-of-a-kind writer when it comes to technology and society. →
Revolver Berlin, ISBN: 978-3868951950 256 pages, German, English, 2012
Thinking for a minute of all the books celebrating the histories of different singular institutions put together, we can then imagine →
Sub Rosa, Book+DVD, ISBN: 978095 5736117, SR314, 2011
Treating sound as memory and involving a number of different professionals can achieve the most interesting results. “Sounds From Beneath” is the result of →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816674657, 232 pages, English, 2011
In “Improper Life” Campbell develops his thought-provoking philosophical writing around the contrast →
CD – Aural Terrains
In the form of a reflection on emotional, psychological and physiological involvements with the words “home” and “territory”, the sounds that underlie this project include words, narrated stories, →
The meltdown at Fukushima Daiichi set off by the Tōhoku earthquake (which occurred despite Japan’s sophisticated prevention systems and the country’s solid reputation in disaster management) has rekindled a cold-war imagery of atomic →
Transcript Verlag, ISBN: 9783837611304, 350 pages, 2011, English
After distancing and distinguishing itself from traditional literature as much as possible, digital literature has achieved a stable academic status and a decent number →
In the opening pages of Understanding Media, when introducing his most controversial and well-known claim, McLuhan presented electric light as an example of a medium without a message. This concept finds a literal incarnation →
Störung/Cameo, Book+DVD, str009, 2012
Per diverso tempo, la natura effimera dei festival (eventi nei quali è possibile rapportarsi ad opere d’arte, conferenze e live acts che terminano appena la manifestazione si conclude) è →
CD – Gruenrekorder
The reasons why a sound-artist might specifically limit the locations where sound is captured are numerous. In this case Ernst Karel has chosen the many transport systems typical of a mountain as the subject of →
CD – Editions Mego
The acoustic and electric sequences of this new production written by Mike McGuire are immediately dreamy, circular and iterated. Sounds and reworks (mainly of guitar) are unraveled in →
Unnamed soundsculpture is a video produced by onformative and chopchop and realized by Daniel Franke and Cedric Kiefer. A cloud of 22000 points, following the movements of a dancer giving a free interpretation of a →
CD – Unsounds
This is the second release on Unsounds for Francisco López, a sound-artist who doesn’t require much of an introduction in the international digital-electroacoustic experimentation enclave. The two tracks, respectively →
