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 – and/OAR
Luigi Turra presents three CDs in a single release for and/OAR, including an equal number of extended and distinct compositions – Enso, Ancient Silence and Shasekishu respectively. From the beginning the →
CD – Touch
Two distinct compositions complete this release by Chris Watson & Marcus Davidson for the renowned label Touch. The first track (composed by Chris Watson only) “Midnight at the Oasis” stands out for its focus on exploring →
CD – Dragon’s Eye
Minimal digital sequences, crackling and very refined, fill the listening space. Lightly throbbing sound developments are central to this project by Lucia H. Chung and Martin →
CD – Die Schachtel
It’s not irrelevant that “Death By Water” was recorded on the small island of Giudecca in Venice, even if the distilled threads shine very abstractly and synthetically – →
CD – Room40
Attivo dalla seconda metà degli anni novanta, Ralph Steinbrüchel, sperimentatore svizzero che già abbiamo avuto modo d’apprezzare su Domizil, 12k, and/OAR, Line e Non Visual Objects, torna a pubblicare su Room40, etichetta sotto le cui insegne avevano →
CD – Fang Bomb
A hoarse voice stands out. This is the beginning of “Scotona Song”, conceived as something like an opening sketch that features walkie-talkie humming and a droning organ – →
DVD – Winds Measure
Randomly found old Kodachrome slides and an uncomplicated digital set-up (laptops, midi controllers, a video projector, two diaprojectors, dimmer, lights and induction/contact microphones) are the basis of “Lacunae”, an →
CD Anty-Copyright
Let’s be honest, when faced with a new Anty-Copyright crew release we are always prepared to encounter something unusual, radical and extremist, even from the perspective of audio art and →
CD – Brut Claire
La Manufacture de Chaussures in Bordeaux is a 1930s shoe factory that since 1998 has been transformed into TNT, a urban place for the re-appropriation of public →
CD – Oral
Even with its ultra-minimalist conceptualization, this collection of very abstract and harsh sound elaborations – made by manipulating turntables – manages to function as a kind of “symbolic scratching”. →
