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 + audio cassette in a boxset – Gagarin
Chromdioxidgedächtnis is the new release by Felix Kubin for Gagarin Records, featuring a boxset that includes both a CD and an audiocassette tape for a decidedly vintage flavor. In the early →
2CD – Denovali
Behind the enigmatic moniker Moon Zero hides the London artist, sound designer, experimental author, filmmaker and David Lynch fan Tim Garratt. The tracks on Tombs, following the thread of a rarefied and environmental inspiration, were sketched, played →
CD – Baskaru
Rutger Zuydervelt invites us to take a walk “through” the orchestra. Stay Tuned began life as an installation piece in which different speakers present a different group of instruments playing a single note, as if an orchestra →
CD – Aural Terrains
Created using only a piano and a computer, this Michael Edwards release for Aural Terrains is impressive listening. Self-written software was employed in the compositional process and for the management of technical skills, modulating streams of →
LP – Dekorder
A city lives in unbridled luxury while underneath is the suffrage of a few. No, this is not the plot of Elysium but the last dystopia by Janek Schaefer, now back on Dekorder.schaefer assembles diverse materials →
CD – World Edition
This work, co-producted with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) is the latest project by Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer with a background in jazz and composition who since the eighties has been based in Berlin and has been →
12” – Pan
Bill Koulingas’ Berlin-based PAN Records focus on electronic, experimental and sound art, promoting a rather harsh, abstract, conceptual and techno-oriented catalogue. We are in the borderland between clubbing culture and a more sophisticated investigative approach, a form →
CD – Denovali
This new release by Matthew Collings – a composer now based in Scotland – is published by Denovali and features six compositions. Collings, who has been involved in several interesting collaborations (e.g. with Dag Rosenqvist of Jasper →
CD – Gruenrekorder
There’s an unusual story behind this release. In 2013, millions of cicadas invaded the metropolitan area of New York. These insects with a musical attitude appear only once every seventeen years and some consider the event a →
12” – Le Cabanon
Released only on 12″ vinyl for Le Cabanon, this Horla production references two fantastic horror tales written by Guy de Maupassant in the late 19th century, stories that many literature aficionados consider exemplary chronicles of human →
