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 + booklet – Glacial Movements
The composer Fernando Corona, better known as Murcof, needs no further introduction after the outputs of the last decade. Released by the Roman label Glacial Movements, Lost in Time is a 2014 double vinyl →
CD – Kvitnu
Released by Kvitnu, Transition is the new studio album by Plaster, a moniker hiding the real name of Gianclaudio Hashem Moniri (earlier in a duo with Giuseppe Carlini). Transition shows a different approach from the past: more →
12” – Le Cabanon
Born in 1987, Othello Aubern is Italian from his mother’s side and Swiss from his father’s, and currently lives in Omsk, a Russian city located in Southwestern Siberia, capital of the region. Maybe the sky of →
CD – Denovali
Behind the moniker of Ensemble Economique there is the Californian Brian Pyle and soon our memory goes to his project Starving Weirdos, featuring Merrick McKinlay. He is a very prolific artist: his career started already more →
2CD – Sub Rosa
If the current political situation in Turkey represents a diminishing of personal and collective liberty, this release for Sub Rosa can become an exemplar of modernity repressed, a zone of influence that has not been subjugated →
CD – mAtter
This is such a splendid, elegiac album that the title Six Pieces For Guitar seems a little modest and simplistic. This album is released by Matter, a well-know Japanese independent label founded and curated by Yukitomo Hamasaki. →
LP – Denovali
Light and shadow, a piano, attenuated percussion and a bass-viola. “There is a topos at the core of my works,” Thomas Köner says: “I travel around the world and record sounds and images, they are unique voices →
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2CD – Phonophon
With artwork by Tobias Schmitt – a name familiar to those who follow Gruenrekorder – this release celebrates the fifth anniversary of the Verein zur Förderung von Phonographie und experimenteller Musik e.V. and the phonophon concert series. →
CD – Gruen
Hafdis Bjarnadóttir is a field recordist with a purist approach: all sound sources are untreated and none of the captures included man-made noises. The artist is intent on bringing out the magic of the landscapes, favouring an →
CD – Baskaru
The textures of Sawako are delicate and iterative, pervaded by natural sounds but also dilated drones. Sawako moves with a quiet confidence in these night spaces, producing fluent concatenations, melodies and exquisite interludes. Six years have passed →
