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.
LP – Drone Records
With a drone-experimental attitude the nomen omen series of the German label Drone Records is its fifth release: a vinyl featuring on the A side “Gjallarbru” a track by Gydja, followed by “Furnace” and “The Last →
CD – Karaoke Kalk
When we first listen to the first part of The Sea is Never Full, we soon feel that this is a classical remembrance and holy composition, with piano weaves and sequences run by experimental and →
4CD – Domizil
Twenty years is not that long for a non-mainstream label such as Domizil, especially when no-one complains about the changing times. This is particularly the case when being forerunners and not followers, even if experimenting is →
CD – Mego
Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Arto Lindsay, Joe Talia, Ricardo Villalobos and Keith Fullerton Whitman create a special and unconventional collaboration, pervaded by repetitive rhythms. In our opinion, Villalobos may be the rhythm connector: a Chilean →
CD – Touch
Brian Williams, aka Lustmord – a veteran of dark ambient scenes and member of the industrial combo SPK – has for the first time published a solo album under his own name with Touch Music, an old →
2LP – Aussenraum
Active since 2006 and based in Lausanne, the ensemBle baBel is a group of musicians which has already worked with Christian Marclay. In 2012 the band played four works by the composer. In his musical attitude, the →
CD + DVD + book – Unsounds
Anne-James Chaton, Thurston Moore and Andy Moor have worked together for this release, whose artwork cannot remain indifferent. On the cover is printed the title of the project, Heretics. While opening the hardback, →
SD Card – RecursosRenovables
We open a strange package, made with scraps of comic books and wrapped in a yellow plastic tape. It’s the tape commonly used for building construction or in case of car accident, and all over it →
CD – Denovali
Elysian Park is the third album of Franz Kirmann, a French producer based in London, and is also his second release with the record company Denovali. The work includes fourteen tracks and follows “Hyper Trophies”, an installation →
Medicine and music have an intertwined history, going back to shamanic traditions that live on within contemporary practices aiming to heal body and mind through sound. Michele Spanghero taps into this notion obliquely with “Ad lib.”, a disquieting sound sculpture →
