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 – Amorfon
We are at the extreme borders of experimental jazz and free form, where they collide with different musical wisdom and expertise. Jorge Queijo is a Portuguese drummer, Hiroki Chiba is a Japanese bassist and Yoshio Machida is →
CD – Aagoo
Diego Martinez, aka Lumen Lab, began his musical career in 2009 at the age of fifteen, using drum machines, secondhand synths and any electronic device he could lay his hands on. His post-industrial approach, infused by noise →
CD 8-page booklet – ARTEksounds
Katarzyna Glowicka ventures into a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for many one of the highest expressions of love in all of literature, but for others a controversial work, who argue that these texts are →
CD – 12K
Federico Durand is an Argentinian composer who is well known for a series of refined and delicate releases on labels such as Spekk, Own, and Desire Path. The seminal idea of A Través Del Espejo dates to →
CD – Domizil
Commemorations are always complicated and the tenth anniversary of the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is no exception. This is an institution that brings together scientists and →
CD – Two Acorns
Two reel-to-reel tape machines and two tape loops of keyboards with similar time structures but each with different overlapping chords. What flows from Akagi’s grooves are the very quietist sounds, beatific and enveloping to listen to. →
CD – Denovali
Today, digital communications, the proliferation of media, concerns for personal privacy, networked surveillance and the ability to hack networks, all generate particular previously unthinkable conjunctions in the relationship between individuals, institutions and communities. The topic of espionage →
CD – Cronica Electronica
Roha is the first solo album by Andreas Trobollowitsch, ex member of the duo Nörz and Acker Velvet, a musician and Vienna-based composer, performer and sound artist that, in collaboration with David Schweighart, composed the soundtrack →
DAT – BIN
There are only twenty-five copies of this project by Jonas Olesen. Built with a Function Generator and an analogue recorder Panasonic SV 3800 DAT it is the result of a fifteen-minute sound continuum using a physically corrupted →
CD – FF`Space
Hectic Truer is a beat-orientated electronic project by Yu Miyashita, aka Yaporigami, a Japanese artist who has been active since 2005. The artist has a total of ten different releases to his name (both EPs and albums) →
