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.
If we were able to invisibly occupy a sculptural exhibition with our eyes closed, what kind of sounds would we hear and have resonate in our minds? Natalia Domínguez Rangel’s “Overlap” is an artwork that works to answer this question. →
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder, ISBN-13: 978-8409128617, English, 264 pages, 2019, Germany
It is perhaps surprising that experimental music labels have recently produced some of the most interesting experiments in print publishing. Maybe →
2 x 10″ vinyl – Arbitrary
Copenhagen-based musician and composer Mads Emil Nielsen generally works with hybrid sources, made from sounds combined with glitches, calibrated drums and orchestral samples. The eclectic experimenter founded his own label, Arbitrary, in 2014, while →
CD – Gruenrekorder
During the 20th edition of Kamuna on August 4th 2018, a habitual music event in the Karlsruhe Museum, three different in-situ performances took place. The locations were the project room ßpace, the space Halo ARS and the →
One of the industrial sectors which has been conceptually affected the most by Covid-19 lockdowns is the airline industry. The inability to fly somewhere else together with the suddenly increased danger around us, has redefined the ‘flight’ as both a →
CD – empreintes DIGITALes
Oscillations planétaires is the first solo album by Chantal Dumas, referencing geological phenomena and processes. Dumas seems to suggest that field recording and electroacoustic sound might have a strong correspondence with cosmic activities. The release is →
CD – Unsounds
The Body Imitates the Landscape is published by Unsounds, a label focused on sound art, contemporary composition and free form experimentation. The project was initially conceived as a sound installation by artist Adi Hollander. Hollander used different →
CD – Galerie Weisser Elefant
Éliane Radigue is a French composer, who was one of the first artists to make use of analog synthetizers, experimenting with other aspects of electroacoustic and minimalist music. The Galerie Weisser Elefant organized a well-deserved →
12″ vinyl – 90%WASSER
Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg and Felix Kubin have produced a split EP for 90%WASSER. On the A-side, the first musician presents 8 short and interesting productions, lasting 2-4 minutes each. On the B-side, Kubin has set a →
Vinyl 12″ – Slimvolume
This vinyl production references modernist experimentalism and is largely influenced by the tradition of spoken word and sound poetry. The tracks are interdisciplinary and proto-multimedia art forms, here developed by artists such as Martha Rosler, Ed →
