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 – 23Five
An almost mystic sensitivity pervades, in this project, the multifaceted inspiration of Jean-Francois Laporte, a French-Canadian electro-acoustic experimenter. The first track, ‘Electro-Prana’, is calibrated on pretty ‘physical’ and ‘classical’ →
‘Broadband’ basically was implemented to bring video on the web. The pioneer stamp-sized quicktime shorts and the uncertainty of compression that often corrupted the frames reproduction was suddenly something of the past. YouTube was →
Check the DEAF photo set here
Deaf (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) has always been different from the other festivals, with a long time experience (The organizing institution V2_ celebrated 25 years of activity) →
CD – Apegenine
Very intimate sounds that evoke natural landscapes, these by Emanuele Errante in ‘Migrations’, confirming, after his previous experiences with the moniker Mais and the ‘Absolute’ EP (for Maetrixsolution), →
CD – Poeta Negra
What immediately stands out in the artwork of Keen, an audio-visual project by Dimitris Mitsiopoulos, Kostas Glazias and Haris Martis, is the setting of the cover photo, taken at →
Launched on May 1st 2006, Telekommunisten is the first proto venture communist enterprise, one hundred per cent workers’ owned and operated technology company. Based in Bootlab (Berlin), this self-declared ‘anti-war, against corporate globalization, against →
CD – Huume/Audioglobe
Smooth post-ambient atmospheres, stylized sequences formalized in calibrated dissonances, carefully studied articulations, following the research paths he walked down before using different monikers (Luomo, Uusitalo, Conoco, Sistol). Auditory glitch-dub →
There’s always been a tight relationship between art and advertising. In the past as well as in present times artists worked for advertising and/or with ads in their artworks. Some famous ads are →
CD – Hefty/Audioglobe
Quiet and introspective electronica, Victor Bermon’s music rests on accurate samplings of guitar and piano, on cuts and melodic iterations often crossed with rhythms just as light. Gentle jumps →
The famous ‘Protrude Flow’, permanently exhibited at the Ars Electronica Center in Linz, is one of the few spectacular electromagnet sculptures artworks. Its ability to model rounded forms out of a liquid black →
CD – Kvitnu
This production, in an elegant and special edition made of ecologic cardboard with golden tints, is entitled ‘Wag the Swing’. It’s the latest work by the Ukrainian artists →
book – Constant V/J9
This is the catalogue of Verbindigen/Jonction 9 festival that took place in 2005 between Brussels, Liège and Antwerp. Taking over language as a →
CD – Daly City Records
Fascinations and obscure frequencies, hypnotic assonances, electronic audio-abuse difficult to place, not really experimental, not really minimal-dubby, not completely breakcore, but containing elements of all these three styles. →
book – The MIT Press – ISBN 0262232499
Internet spectatorship is a matter of fact, after the semiotic capital has pervaded online commercial strategies with a specific use of the body in →
