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.
Book – Eutopia 2007
Curated by the Zemos98 collective, ‘Repeat Please: Cultura VJ’, an exhibition included in the rich program of the Eutopia 2007 festival held in Cordoba, Spain, reflects a →
People are used to the sound of skin played by percussion instruments. Most of them consist of at least one membrane (skin) that is stretched over a shell and struck, either directly with →
CD – Smallvoices
Field recording, electroacoustic, evanescent resonances, minimal acts full of organic substances, atmospheres finely wrought in the void by impenetrable geometries, evoking zen gardens (graphically portrayed on the cover →
CD – Cold Blue
Complex assonant vocalism exercises, mindful of ‘polite’ inspirations, mediaeval interlacings, reworked in new acoustic research contexts. The work of Daniel Lentz can be placed with the above unusual →
One of the most common practices in the media art field has always been the hacking of everyday tools, like the countless devices that expand our own computer potential. In recent years, →
book – University Of Minnesota Press – ISBN 9780816641192
Database are collections of data with an embedded sense and their planned structure defines the conceptual relationships among items. It’s a cultural infrastructure, →
CD – Cold Blue Music
Highly imaginative atmospheres, experimental attitudes untangled in sensitive sequences, iterations and ellipses, marked from the first track, ‘Sevan’ by the Armenian Parik Nazarian vocal interventions, well set →
CD – Expect Candy
Quiet and elegant intertwining of cinematic ambient weaves, rhythms, experiences unstably balanced in the beats heavily cut. It’s a snug electronica, even with melodic treatments, subdivided by →
CD – Baskaru
Gabriel ‘Gogooo’ Hernandez sounds are ethereal and crystal clear, weighted in delicate weaves. This Parisian experimenter is comfortable both with traditional instruments (melodic guitar, piano, barrel organ) and laptop or →
CD – Base Records
This is an experiment starting with 8 etherogeneous electronic tracks composed by Wolfgang Dorninger, released as an album. The project starts from then on, dissecting the music with →
8 BIT
a documentary about art and video games
(tags: art video videogame media)
Message Tape – Suck UK
Black out the dots on the tape to create a digital-like message.
(tags: hacking visual)
In “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge†(1979), Lyotard argued that our postmodern age is marked by “incredulity towards grand narratives” (the progress of history, the ability of knowing everything by →
CD – Flux Records
This is a brilliant conceptual posthumous soundtrack, inspired by the Millenium fear, trying to sonify this atmosphere during the two years before 2000 in Los Angeles. Fear, city on →
book – Imprensa Oficial do Estado de São Paulo – ISBN: 9788560824007
Establishing an online forum means to deal with completely different procedures than making a real one offline: time →
