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 – Dekorder
John Hegre is back with a solo album that intertwines daring experiments with its favorite instrument: the guitar. Here he’s putting on stand by his participation to Jazzkammer group, →
After investigating on ‘semantic capitalism’ and ‘taylorisation of speech’ with the project ‘Google Adwords’, Christophe Bruno reflects on the economic dynamics of collective hallucination. According to the French net artist “The Web, specifically →
CD – Rephlex/Goodfellas
Another Rephlex based audio ‘abuse’, under the Wilson Claridge direction, in the very label spirit that alternates releases related to the most radical dance areas or planned as plain experimental, →
dvd – Absinth
Electronic textures, frequencies, fuzzy sounds, improvised moments which always come back to cyclic sequences, iterations that mimic the images, which are well programmed and selected in homogeneous loop groups. →
CD – Pogus
Dimitri Voudouris is Greek, long time Johannesburg citizen, chemist, electroacoustic composer, and founder of Unyazi first African electronic music festival. He’s not new to digital audio and multimedia experiments, →
During the past several years there was a significant increase in closed circuit television ans surveillance cameras in public space. Cameras pop up from outer walls, the top of ATM machines or traffic lights, →
Spin Cycle by Spencer Kiser is a turntable that allows the user to navigate color and aural spaces. It’s a plain ordinary turntable, surmounted by a webcam. On the same turntable, there are →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Iterated and minimal melodic micro-sequences, drones that evolve in dilated atmospheres, ambient textures and reverberations veined by a gloomy psychedelic allure, deep frequencies that cross the melancholic articulations of →
CD + dvd C0C0S0L1DC1T1
The beginning of the first video works by Julio Soto, ‘The Possibility Of Utopia’, looks like taken from Peter Cook’s radical project ‘Plug City’ or from another →
CD – Pogus
Do you remember the talkbox? It was an effect from the Sixties that distorted the sound of a guitar like a wah-wah pedal or a robotic voice (the result →
The ‘hacking’ practice is an overused and misunderstood term in pop culture and contemporary arts. ‘Hacking’ usually carries negative connotations and it is used referring the activity of breaking into computer systems. Nevertheless, →
In a special edition of El Pais Digital reporting the Arco festival in 2001, the Spanish artist Ricardo Iglesias, one of the net art pioneers in his country, said →
CD – Anechoic
Only thirty minutes of sounds in this new project by Kim Cascone, but they immediately carry us in imaginary liquid spaces, claustrophobic, gloomy and disquieting (almost like Twin →
dvd – Shitkatapult
Sidereal spaces, trembling emissions, crooked views of natural spaces and industrial places, strange beings and a human figure, halfway through the monk and the shaman. Actually electronic sounds, →
