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.
Despite real time communication (in text, audio, pictures or video) the physical distance from a loved one is still deeply perceived by our bodies. The Space Between Us is a very simple but powerful conceptual app by David Horvitz that →
CD – Cronica Electronica
Roha is the first solo album by Andreas Trobollowitsch, ex member of the duo Nörz and Acker Velvet, a musician and Vienna-based composer, performer and sound artist that, in collaboration with David Schweighart, composed the soundtrack →
Lars Muller, ISBN: 978-3037784334, English, 112 pages, 2014,
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts is a catalogue of an extremely well researched exhibition of the work of this famous Hungarian painter, photographer and Bauhaus school professor. Alongside a →
Audio recordings of a voice evoke a person and also the period when that person has that specific tone of voice. In our analogue past, tapes were the most popular repositories for voices, as they were personal and cheap media. →
DAT – BIN
There are only twenty-five copies of this project by Jonas Olesen. Built with a Function Generator and an analogue recorder Panasonic SV 3800 DAT it is the result of a fifteen-minute sound continuum using a physically corrupted →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822360612, English, 288 pages, 2015
Even if we consider “the voice” as a sound source, in an average personal imaginary ‘sound’ is something external, while “the voice” is something internal and intimate. If we add to →
The trajectory of Peter Sunde, from the glorious days of Piratbyrån (which he co-founded), complimented by then Brazilian president Lula, to his recent period in prison, is that of a coherent radical activist. His efforts to affirm the political and →
CD – FF`Space
Hectic Truer is a beat-orientated electronic project by Yu Miyashita, aka Yaporigami, a Japanese artist who has been active since 2005. The artist has a total of ten different releases to his name (both EPs and albums) →
4 cd box + booklet – Sussidiaria
Massimo Pavarini, who died at the age of forty-two in 2012, has without a doubt embodied the very essence of the Italian underground music of his generation. Pavarini was a great listener with →
Les presses du réel, ISBN-13: 978-2955226704, English, French, 208 pages, 2015, France
How can we define the collection of “contemporary art” if the latter doesn’t engage with digital technologies? This was the topic of a panel hosted by Rhizome in →
cellF by Guy Ben-Ary is a “biological self-portrait” divided into two parts. First the artist reprogrammed his skin cells to transform them into a functional neural network, defined as his “external brain.” Then he developed a robotic body to →
CD – Estuary
{A Simple Procedure} is a celebration of the legacy that comes to us from Cageian experimentalism and is a re-imagining of a seminal piece by the master – ‘Imaginary Landscape No. 5’, viewed through the lens of →
Sub Rosa, ISBN 978-9609368704, English, book + CD, 48 pages, 2012, Belgium
“Sirens” was an audiovisual performance by Thanasis Kaproulias (Novi_sad) and Ryoichi Kurokawa that took place at different festivals around the world. This book is due legacy to its →
Gelöschte Masse (“Deleted Masses”) by Hannes Seidl is a brilliant sound artwork using audio manipulation in a political way, through a sophisticated aesthetics. It’s a three channel sound installation consisting of five audio recordings from protests taken in different cities →
