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.
Offline – Online Publishing: The Love for Print in an Age of Electronic Media is a conference on the paper/pixel dual and controversial relationship. It’s scheduled for the 19th of January (today), at the →
Second Life, one of the most populated MMORPG, is an important watching point to verify how the borderline between real and virtual tends to become more and more ephemeral. In the last months →
CD – Beau Brun
Songbirds of the world unite, Cagesan (small chirping birds coming from Tasmania) will be your vanguard. Everybody can be a rockstar, the super-goldfinch said (and we agree of course). →
As human civilization devises ever more powerful machines, living among them may become more and more difficult. People find themselves surrounded by incidentally created sounds and noises which are out of synch with →
CD – Grain Of Sound
If the first excitements about the laptop music’s novelties are already gone, time has come now to start to question more in depth the specific intrinsic characteristics →
book – Thames and Hudson, ISBN 0500238227
“Art is not solely defined by its context – its appearance in the traditional art world – but rather by the type and quality of →
CD – Staalplaat
Initially released by Staalplaat in 1999 (the same year of his passing away) as part of the ‘Box Of Silk And Dogs’ comes out again in an elegant triangular package →
Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of flirting and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites like MySpace are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users →
CD – Hymen
This the Thomas Pujols, aka Nebulo, fascinating debut album. He can flatter himself of a Conservatoire National de Bordeaux degree in electroacoustic composition and at the same time he’s fond →
Let’s say that almost the whole Google page ranking (so the fundaments of the web economy at large) is based on (key)words excellence. Let’s say that words are still the only human understandable parameters →
CD – Touch
Three long recordings, as in the ‘Iris’ debut album, bless again the elegant fruitfulness of Rosy Parlane. And again her sounds are presented with the refined Jon Wozencroft artwork: →
book + dvd – Laurence King Publishing, ISBN 185669490
This is the first adequately documented VJ culture compendium. Even if vjing is only one of the many possible mutual relationships →
CD – Adaadat
This is a collaborative project involving Joe Banks (Disinformation), audio-visual artist and electronic experimenter close to the circuit bending scene, together with Mark Pilkington, editor of the Strange Attractor Journal. →
Before the advent of online communication, creating a fake trustworthy identity has been more complex than just improvising during a chat using a handful of online tools. Amongst the ancestors of →
