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.
What is there in common between our current obsession with data (as pertaining to the debates surrounding privacy and social media) and the fetishism for vinyl expressed in record collecting? The idea that an immaterial process can be stockpiled carries →
View the Sonar 2006 photo gallery.
The 2006 edition of Sònar, now renamed as “international festival of advanced music and multimedia art” has again opened its flux of sounds, involving a non stop very large public →
What is the sound of electricity? Amongst the possible answers to this question there’s the one given by the Canadian artist Jean-Pierre Aubé through his ‘Save the waves’, a giant installation made at the →
In the overflow of precarious sequences and cuttings, remainding the weak post-PC music productions boom of middle nineties, the personal video productions, fueled by integrated webcams and family camcorders, is pouring on the web, proving once →
A timeline made by a series of grids of 3×3 points. This is the first sight of 9Dots, an experimental project presented at the web flash festival 2006. It’s an audio/visual device implemented by Pierre Delmas →
“Breathing is something singers seem to insist on doing…” according to what the software house Waves claims presenting its new plug-in DeBreath. Thus, in order to solve this annoying inconvenient, digital technology has created this application →
While Internet population has already started asking if Web 2.0 is getting boring because of all its services and plugins, net artists keep exploring all the alternatives offered by blogs as →
The sequencer, meant as content editing interface, has already gone too far from the cultural nexus with the musical production, becoming a symbolic archetype that structures digital informations. One of the phenomena it has generated is →
WYHIWYG what you hear is what you get. This seems to be the last link of a long chain of acronyms coined during the years and related to the evolution of the man-machine interaction. From the →
Visiting the official website of a traditional piano-making company like Grotrian, you will be surprised by the presence of what is simply called ‘game’, the Pianolina, that is instead a real digital musical instrument. The invitation →
