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 – 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 →
CD – XI Records
From the first two compositions, “G” and “note, rest”, lasting five and seven minutes, we notice some timbre and microtonal differences. The protagonist of the tracks is the bassoon, empowered by microphones used to give life →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 979-1501305450, English, 272 pages, 2018, UK
The relationship between the body and the listening of sounds definitely can’t anymore be reduced simply to our ears. Holger Schulze in this book argues the extensions →
cassette – Crónica
For the lovers of contemporary experimentations (with obvious reference to avant-garde music of the second half of 20th century), the name of Pauline Oliveros is a key figure, not only for the unconventional use of her instrument, →
LP – Gruenrekorder
With reference to retrofuture aesthetics, we need to mention Sounds of the Projection Box, an act of reverence to the vintage technology from Michael Lightborne, an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Television →
Strange Attractor Press, ISBN-13: 978-1907222665, English, 264 pages, 2018, UK
There seems to be a consistent interest over the last decade in “hauntology” (as Derrida called it) and media over time, periodically re-emerging in art: →
CD – Opa Loka
Bart van Dongen & Richard van Kruysdijk go beyond the specific tradition of the prepared piano. In this coherent and very musical partnership they use the most classical instrument, but they hybridize the piano with several →
