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.
LP – Warm
After Sans Cesse in 2016 and Cluzel in 2018, Mathias Delplanque and Guillaume Ollendorff release a new album under the name Ply, as the last one produced by the label Warm. Listening to the first of the →
The mystery that envelops the creation and the existence of the Universe for how – so little – we know it, has over the centuries attracted the intellect and the imagination of people of all ethnic groups and religions. In →
Cassette – Crónica
There is a Japanese word, 間 (ma), which is not easy to translate. 間 is a negative space, the volume between two parts or structural elements. 間 is an interval, a break, “the simultaneous awareness of form →
Living over-scheduled, over-busy lives, can we still be said to be sensitive to synchronicity? Apparently, yes, as being sensitive to all kinds of symmetries, including the aural ones, is more related to our biological nature, encoded in our DNA, than →
Cassette – Dinzu Artefacts
Insistent tickles, a constant background buzz, some slightly perceptible gongs, some whistles, refrained frequencies, some metal screeches and other warm and sensitive audio emergencies. This is the set of samples you can experience while listening →
CD – Amorfon
Yoshio Machida is a prolific experimenter and a recognized artist in the free form enclave. Constantin Papageorgiadis is a Belgian musician and sound engineer in love with vintage analogue instruments. Together they present an interesting project →
CD – Denovali
A cryptic female voice says something in Korean. The narration develops theatrically, following some embracing, warm and disturbing ways. The background electronics is accurately unraveled, with insisting and anxious atmospheres. The multimedia artist Orson Hentschel enjoys musical →
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 →
