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 – Farmacia901
The three digital compositions that constitute this project are the result of an exhaustive “recycling”, rather than remixing. Author Asmus Tietchens questions the necessity of creating original music when “digital and analogue tools allow us to derive →
Today there’s a growing “machine audience” nurtured by projects that interpret data and use it to feed other systems (such as Google Books feeding Google Corpus for their online services). “Novice Art Blogger” by Matthew Plummer Fernandez joins this scene, →
CD – LINE
NHK is a collaborative project initiated in 2006 by Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro, Japanese artists who live and work in Osaka. Matsunaga operates under several different pseudonyms such as NHK’Koyxen, NHKyx, Internet Magic and Koyxen, while →
CD – Hubro
Improvised music in fine form courtesy of Labfield, a duo originally formed by Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs (Territory Band, Seval, Fire! Orchestra) and Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach (Huntsville, Dans Les Arbres, Arve Henriksen, Erik Honoré ), now →
EYE Film Institute Netherlands, ISBN-13: 978-9071338007, English, 240 pages, 2013, The Netherlands
Oskar Fischinger has long been a pivotal figure in “visual music,” surely a pioneer, well ahead of his time. Acknowledged as an “experimental animator and filmmaker,” he innovated →
Artistic work addressing synaesthesia and the interrelation of the senses, starting from visual music, has often been based on the notion that light and sound are both vibratory phenomena, one mechanic and the other electromagnetic, and as such can be →
CD – Hideous Replica
Recorded in Berlin between 2013 and 2014, this album by Argentine musician Lucio Capece includes two extended compositions of approximately 26 and 21 minutes in which we recognise analogue synthesizers, oscillators, a ring modulator, an equaliser →
“Mirage” by Ralf Baecker is a complex project (in the true tradition of this artist) using optics and artificial intelligence to form a “projection apparatus.” It uses a ‘fluxgate magnetometer’ to detect the earth’s magnetic field, feeding it into a →
24xCD (box set) – Baskaru
Frank Rothkamm’s conceptual excursions are consistently surprising. Last time it was Reno that made us jump, a muzak album that certainly does not occupy first place in the German composer’s discography. Prior to that release →
CD – Chmafu Nocords
The metaphor of the virus has marked the history of art and contemporary electronic music perhaps more than any other concept over the last fifty years. The seminal visions of William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson’s →
