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 – 12 K
Rarefied and abstract digital soundscapes, acoustic iterations (‘Broken Guitar’, ‘Discarded Violin’) and bleeps come to us from David Newman, aka Autistici, for the 12K label directed by Taylor Deupree. →
CD – Non Visual Objects
Sampling field recordings using the hum (the noise produced by the difference of potential between electronic devices connected together) as a base is truly unusual. The interference is →
Icon Watch
Pricey interface-like watch
(tags: software)
CD – Underscan
This is an interesting compilation by Underscan Recordings, a Berlinese label founded by the productive Ralph Pytlik and Markward Wagner, and it’s the first release of the ‘Now’ series that →
CD – Cock Rock Disco
The artistic trajectory of Jason Forrest, aka DJ Donna Summer, is evolving towards more and more radical ways. He’s one of the gods of plagiarist breakcore, →
book – Gingko Press – ISBN 1584232455
Formerly known as ‘Nigeria Scam’, the scam emails only apparently coming from Africa are a classic in the phishing category. →
We can define “fake culture” as one of the most updated “detournement” embodiment, a concept periodically (re)discovered by artists. Facilitated by both the infinite possibilities of coding and the ocean of →
CD – Revisited Records
Recorded by Klaus Schulze (accompanied by the percussionist Harald Grosskopf) from the end of 1976 and the following September, Body Love Vol. 2 was born originally as a →
Z.T.m.V. #07 Gordijnen
Ascii Art on a curtain
(tags: art media)
CD – Ad Noiseam
Gloomy bases, vibrant drones and sharp beats, faithful to his own electronic imprinting, Mike Harris, five years after his latest studio album, is back with the Scorn moniker, calibrating obscure →
The term “intellectual property” (IP) denotes the specific legal rights which authors, inventors and other IP holders may hold and exercise, not the intellectual work itself. Under the intellectual property laws, the →
CD – Conspiracy International
This is the second album after changing the old moniker (Chris & Cosey) for this duo who, together with Genesis P-Orridge and Peter Christopherson, formed the famous Throbbing →
VAVAsoft is an unusual software house: its two applications seem to be the outcome of creator’s real needs more than the outcome of some market-driven strategies. Tinnitus Tamer is a tone generator replicating in →
The 2008 edition of the Share Festival has already started in Turin, sporting a prestigious collaboration with Bruce Sterling as a guest curator. Entitled “Manufacturing” the festival is celebrating its fourth edition →
