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.
Optical Sound/Les Presses du Réel, ISBN-13: 979-1096749034, French, 206 pages, 2017, France
Musicians have historically been close to visual artists, and significant parts of the avant-garde and alternative music scenes have been directly engaged with →
LP – Aussenraum
The Australian sound artist MP Hopkins currently lives and works on aboriginal land, in New South Wales, a coastal area that according to the maps shouldn’t be so far from Sydney. Matthew Philip, (MP is the →
Installations in the form of musical autonomous machines have the same hidden power to attract as autonomous creatures, as we attribute music and even more singing as an exclusive ability of sentient beings. The sounds associated with the movement reinforce →
CD + booklet – RVNG Intl
Theory and poetic sound can combine with the goal of contemplating their seminal nucleus. In Anticlines, Lucrecia Dalt seems to marry this ambivalence, giving life to a sound space made of speculative synthesis and →
CD – Cellule 75
This is a new release by Marc Richte, aka Jehm Circs, better known as Black to Comm, whose second album is once again published in Hamburg with his home record company, Cellule 75. The work includes →
CD – GK
The album title is an immediate reference to acousmatic music, despite Gintas K actually not being part of that “land”. More generically, he prefers the sound art scene and his work focuses on digital, glitch and granular →
CD – Spekk
The third album by Andrey Kiritchenko on Spekk immediately engages the listener thanks to its grace, attention to details and little harmonies full of acoustics treatments and orchestral characters. “I let the music be the weathervane of →
2CD – Gruenrekorder
Christina Kubisch and Annea Lockwood met each other in a different age. It was around 1975 and the New York experimental music scene wasn’t as internationally recognized, but both artists already had solid backgrounds. Christina Kubisch had →
CD – Opa Loka
This release seems to be under the influence of an immanent turmoil, as in Stranger Things, the American TV show created by Matt and Ross Duffero, or in “Dark”, another classic of contemporary dystopian sci-fi. The →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190226992, English, 712 pages, 2018, UK
Even arguably stemming from concepts like “generative” and “automatic” what is exactly meant by “Algorithmic Music” ? The two editors of this sumptuous anthology give a →
