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.
A Sonic Bike is a bike that plays sounds following the cyclist’s movements and speed, thanks to two speakers positioned on the front under the handlebar and a geo-referenced audio tracking system via GPS. The generated sounds are mapped to →
CD + BOOKLET – Swarming
Eric La Casa reminds us that the urban spaces we travel through and frequent constitute a personal ecosystem of the city – a world unto itself – and that every architectural space contains, on a →
Vinyl 12″ – Le Cabanon
Thomas Pujols, a French producer who uses the moniker Nebulo, is accustomed to persistent experimentation using mostly polyphonic synthesizers, with which he explores harmonies and dissonances, constructing microtones and other tonal scales that escape the →
12″ Vinyl – Research and Waves
The Berlin label Research and Waves, an artistic project curated by Jasmina Al-Qaisi, Maria Karpushina, Gustavo Méndez Lopez, Norman Neumann and Henrik Nieratschker, released a twelve inch vinyl composed of words, a sort of →
cassette – Crónica
What do nanotechnologies, innovative industrial food safety processes and experimental music have in common? Is the ‘charm’ of certain sound environments alone enough to inspire an entire album of contemporary experimentation? Yes, if the formal result is →
Mo H. Zareei’s ”Material Music” features eight kinetic sound-sculptures made of an electromechanical actuator striking identical blocks of different solid materials, respectively brass, copper, aluminium, steel, hardwood, softwood, glass, and marble. The shifts in striking time are calculated through phase-shifting →
CD – 901
The synogram 間 (Ma), a minimal unit of meaning used in Japanese writing, expresses a decisive concept for numerous artistic and philosophical practices, referring to the notion of the space and time between things, focusing on the →
CD – Raster
There is no future without tears and here the work centres on sensory processing by human-machine hybrids. It’s not the first time Uwe Schmidt aka Atom™ focuses on sounds bordering on pop, soaked with a glitch aesthetic. →
CD – Wandelweiser
The English word “tracery”, “flechtwerk” in German or “nervatura” in Italian can be translated in different ways, first of all as “interlace”, which is well suited to the idea of intricate electronic music, but also as “embroidery”, →
CD – Noton
This is the fourth and penultimate work Alva Noto released for the series Xerrox. The project began in 2007 and is based on the iterative reproduction and manipulation of digital samples, copying and then copying again. Unlike →
