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.
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.
Rapper Prince Harvey, after his computer crashed and his external drive was stolen, managed to record an entire album in Apple Store SoHo in four months, befriending employees, hiding files and using USB sticks and mail. as support. Abbie Hoffman would have been proud.
60″ cassette – Helen Scarsdale Agency
Released under the insignia of the Helen Scarsdale Agency, this latest work by Radioson engages themes of global conspiracy implied in narratives such as those related to Area 51 or in reports on Roswell. →
CD – Aagoo
Diego Martinez, aka Lumen Lab, began his musical career in 2009 at the age of fifteen, using drum machines, secondhand synths and any electronic device he could lay his hands on. His post-industrial approach, infused by noise →
CD – FF`Space
Hectic Truer is a beat-orientated electronic project by Yu Miyashita, aka Yaporigami, a Japanese artist who has been active since 2005. The artist has a total of ten different releases to his name (both EPs and albums) →
CD – R’COUP’D
Coming from R’COUP’D, the parent of the famous Ninja Tunes label, Inner Systems is the latest record by Prequel Tapes. The identity behind the moniker is not known but the music tells a story of an English →
CD – Denovali
With Engtanz Depression Stephan Otten and Oliver Klemm can now boast of six releases with Denovali under the moniker Sankt Otten. Their collaboration with the German label began in 2009 with Morgen Wieder Lustig, a project that →
CD – LINE
NHK is a collaborative project initiated in 2006 by Kouhei Matsunaga and Toshio Munehiro, Japanese artists who live and work in Osaka. Matsunaga operates under several different pseudonyms such as NHK’Koyxen, NHKyx, Internet Magic and Koyxen, while →
Traditional stage rhetorics often find themselves in an awkward place within academic electronic music. The modernist movement wiped the slate clean of the conventions that were made obsolete either by technology or the desire for a clear-cut break with the →
CD – Physical
Lesley Flanigan is an experimental electronic musician who lives in New York City and she certainly does not go unnoticed in her performances – both for her physical presence and for the use of a special tool →
CD – Touch
Geir Jenssen and Helge Sten – better known as Biosphere and Deathprod – have been called by Touch to create a project that is not a collaboration but rather a real split release, a selection that →
CD – Glacial Movements
Alessandro Tedeschi’s Glacial Movements has been recognized for several years for its meritorious work in the areas of experimental, ambient and drone, with a catalogue that plays host to the likes of Mick Harris, Scott Morgan, →
