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.
The perception of events and objects changes dramatically depending on the context in which they are located. The performance, in particular, are related to the atmosphere that surrounds them and the events that happened →
'Making the revolution sexy' is the effective slogan that David Thrussell, songwriter of Melbourne applies for almost twenty years with his band, the Snog, a unique example of political activism is not ostentatious, and applied →
The pioneers and avant-garde electronic musicians have traced a furrow of theories and practices most of the time away from the lights of museums and large institutions. But just to be learned →
The use of video in works that require interaction with the public is very questionable, since it reduces the paradigm unchangeable broadcast what was intended to be received freely or at most through a →
The run-up to the latest technologies fueled by the sirens of marketing is a sad chimera guarantee of success that almost never keeps his empty promises. The genius, however it is often stimulated by →
Display the music seems to be one of the 'necessity' art of the last decade. The projection of spontaneous generated, algorithmic, abstract, poetic or simply arbitrary visual interpretations of music (performed or reproduced) is →
The practices of VJing are born from the use of digital tools at first only to coordinate the flow of materials analog, then evolving to manage the entire process of production and performance. The same →
Scott Draves is an artist with an enviable technical skills. Over the years he has produced the project open, cross-platform 'Bomb', one of the first music software and refined viewers' Electric Sheep ', a screensaver distributed →
Yet another audio/visual symbiosis between a musician and a videoartist who integrate their abilities amplifying each other. Three tracks where dark ambient sounds and the bouncy percussions of Pure, from Vienna, intertwine with Johnny Dekam’s jumpy narration. →
The collaborative dimension created by connected machines takes a different value when it’s part of a live performance, with its uncertain and unique nature. The 242.pilots, a close group of artists (hc Gilje, Kurt Ralske, Lukasz →
