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 – Crónica
Just two tracks, “G”, twenty minutes long, and “S”, thirty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds. It’s this the debut of the duo Luís Antero e Darius Čiuta for Crónica. The album is the result of a very personal →
CD + book – SUPSI
Within audio-art and sophisticated music research there are many productions based on the crossing over between different art forms and subjects. It is a symbiosis of sounds, images, storytelling, theories and philosophies, that offers a →
Vitor Joaquim – Impermanence
A feeling of anxiety immediately takes us when listening to “Here and Now”, the first track of the last release by Vitor Joaquim, a sound artist we remember especially for his works produced by Knivitu, →
CD – Grappa
A small wireless box, easy to wear, that allows every singer-performer to act with no obstacles in the stage space and be able to process in real time the effects and the loops; this is the idea →
LP – Staalplaat
This album is a precious release, a document of the historical installations of the Staalplaat SoundSystem, a sound artists’ collective whose main members are Carlo Crovato, Radboud Mens, Jens Alexander Ewald and Geert-Jan Hobijn. The selected projects →
The tension of sound memories can be formidable when associated with events with dramatic political meaning. They stay in the collective memory, and can resurge if allowed to. Kinmen Island, is the closest Taiwanese island to mainland China (less than →
CD – Transacoustic Research
Imagine for a moment that every musician, before the performance, has also to make their own instrument. This is exactly what happens to the members of The Vegetable Orchestra, an experimental and free form combo that, →
The transformative power of audio technologies can have a powerful impact when applied to acoustic spaces, especially when it gives a room imagined elements. This seems the case for “Spiralalala” by Warsaw’s panGenerator. They modified the iconic spiral staircase of →
CD – Setola Di Maiale
Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V is presented in a elegant folding glazed paperboard with photos on both sides. The artwork is due to Erin McKinney. The project is an important addition to the →
Lost and found. Or lost forever. The feeling of having physically encountered an entity and then being sure we won’t meet it anymore. We have it for objects, and especially for digital content, lost in the abyss of our gigabyte →
