Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
Putting the Pieces Back Together Again is another spectacular complex system built by Ralf Baecker to let us meditate “on self-organisation and scientific methodology”. It consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a large square grid. Each motor has a →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501333231, English, 288 pages, 2018, UK
Our visual memory has been under the public lens of science since neurology became a debated topic in popular media. Personal memory, and its importance for our personal identity →
CD – Transacoustic Research
Immaginate per un attimo che ogni musicista prima d’eseguire un qualsiasi componimento debba anche costruirsi il suo strumento. È quello che accade ai membri di The Vegetable Orchestra, combo sperimentale e free form che dal 1998 →
The transformative power of audio technologies can have a powerful impact when applied to acoustic spaces, especially when it gives a room imagined elements. This seems the case for “Spiralalala” by Warsaw’s panGenerator. They modified the iconic spiral staircase of →
edition mono/monochrom, ISBN-13: 978-3902796578, English, German, 96 pages, 2017, Austrian
This is a monograph about the work of the Argentinian-Austrian artist Juliana Herrero. She uses sound as a revelatory medium, assembling installations which build a ’space’ which is →
CD – Setola Di Maiale
Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V – con un elegante cartonato satinato pieghevole e foto su entrambi i lati: il cui progetto si deve ad Erin McKinney – va ad arricchire il catalogo →
Although it is a too trivial subject, we must admit that we are almost all affected by a more or less serious form of social addiction. The portability of the devices, the simplicity of the interfaces, the increasingly widespread connection →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1783209019, English, 188 pages, 2017, UK
In 2014 the seminal “Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art” book was published, investigating the connections among artworks using physics at nanoscale to question our senses and the perception of →
CD – Om Kult
Quando certe sonorità rimandano dichiaratamente a “incantesimi psicomagici e istruzioni yoga occulte”, ma allo stesso tempo si rifanno anche a pratiche d’esoterici sottogeneri elettronici e noisy, non si può non pensare a William Seward Burroughs, che →
Lost and found. Or lost forever. The feeling of having physically encountered an entity and then being sure we won’t meet it anymore. We have it for objects, and especially for digital content, lost in the abyss of our gigabyte →
Christoph Merian Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3856168674, German, English, 108 pages, 2018, USA
There’s an unsolved dilemma among art historians: is there a sense in looking for connections among artists living in the same country, and especially using the same →
CD – XI Records
Sono differenze timbriche e microtonali quelle che emergono dalle prime due composizioni, “G” e “note, rest”, rispettivamente di circa cinque e sette minuti, brani che hanno come protagonista il fagotto, potenziato dall’utilizzo di microfoni nel dar →
Narciss is a piece of software made with basic artificial intelligence techniques built to analyse itself. The installation, by Waltz Binaire Studio, consists of a computer equipped with a camera in front of a circular mirror. The algorithm translates the →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 979-1501305450, English, 272 pages, 2018, UK
The relationship between the body and the listening of sounds definitely can’t anymore be reduced simply to our ears. Holger Schulze in this book argues the extensions of the →
