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.
10” vinyl transparent – Tonometer
The project of Christian Skjødt was initially a sound installation made for an 18th century wine cellar in the Riga botanic garden. The author is inspired by the site-specific context and evokes all the energy →
CD + book – Aagoo
After the audio-video bender happened in between the end of 90s and the first two decades of the new millennium to many contemporary composers, mostly belonging to the most tendentious and conceptual experimental scene, it’s →
CD – Touch
We have already mentioned the artist, composer and researcher Yann Novak, who in the past released works with different labels such as Murmur, Hibernate, Estuary, his Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Infrequency, Line and Farmacia901. Now it’s the turn →
Bouncing balls provide an endless supply of fun and learning both within games of physical dexterity and through the study of elementary physics. But the capacity to either intuitively or mathematically predict the future trajectory of a spherical object is →
LP – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French →
LP – Warm
After Sans Cesse in 2016 and Cluzel in 2018, Mathias Delplanque and Guillaume Ollendorff release a new album under the name Ply, as the last one produced by the label Warm. Listening to the first of the →
The mystery that envelops the creation and the existence of the Universe for how – so little – we know it, has over the centuries attracted the intellect and the imagination of people of all ethnic groups and religions. In →
Cassette – Crónica
There is a Japanese word, 間 (ma), which is not easy to translate. 間 is a negative space, the volume between two parts or structural elements. 間 is an interval, a break, “the simultaneous awareness of form →
Living over-scheduled, over-busy lives, can we still be said to be sensitive to synchronicity? Apparently, yes, as being sensitive to all kinds of symmetries, including the aural ones, is more related to our biological nature, encoded in our DNA, than →
Cassette – Dinzu Artefacts
Insistent tickles, a constant background buzz, some slightly perceptible gongs, some whistles, refrained frequencies, some metal screeches and other warm and sensitive audio emergencies. This is the set of samples you can experience while listening →
