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 mystery that envelops the creation and the existence of the Universe for how – so little – we know it, has over the centuries attracted the intellect and the imagination of people of all ethnic groups and religions. In →
Living over-scheduled, over-busy lives, can we still be said to be sensitive to synchronicity? Apparently, yes, as being sensitive to all kinds of symmetries, including the aural ones, is more related to our biological nature, encoded in our DNA, than →
Goldsmiths Press / The MIT Press, ISBN-13: ISBN: 978-1906897512, English, 224 pages, 2018, USA
Brandon LaBelle is a key figure in contemporary sound art studies. In this book he expresses the role of sound in political issues through a →
Optical Sound/Les Presses du Réel, ISBN-13: 979-1096749034, French, 206 pages, 2017, France
Musicians have historically been close to visual artists, and significant parts of the avant-garde and alternative music scenes have been directly engaged with →
Combining the choreographic seduction of analogue machines, with the reassessing of a different function, “The Optical Sound Orchestra” by Mariska de Groot – who has long been fascinated by the possibilities of sound – is an exemplary performative media act, →
Wind can modify the hearing of a spoken voice, due to the faster movement of the air. Carrying air molecules faster, it can generate accidental sounds, also propagating our voice far away or only near, depending on its direction. Fluisterende →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190226992, English, 712 pages, 2018, UK
Even arguably stemming from concepts like “generative” and “automatic” what is exactly meant by “Algorithmic Music” ? The two editors of this sumptuous anthology give a →
Univocal/University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1937561697, English, 100 pages, 2016, USA
The relationship between the world of music and the world of literature is a close one, thanks to the shared sounds, some type of structures, →
The Great Pacific garbage patch is a gyre of marine debris, mostly plastic, in the central North Pacific Ocean, discovered in the 1980s. It has recently been rediscovered by the media because of its growth and a provocative petition to →
Bone-conducted sound, or sound that can be heard because the vibrations travel to the ear not through air but through the respective vibrations of the bones of the skull, has been experimented with in hearing aids since the 1920s, but →
