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 – Ici d’ailleurs
Geins’t Naït & L. Petitgand’s performances are mysterious and disturbing settings, imbued with melodic constructions and electronic layers, often dense with industrial references, overlaid with dreamy voices and cinematic arrangements. Here the post-industrial tensions of Geins’t →
CD – Village Green Recordings
Snow Palms, a band now comprised of David Sheppard, Christopher Leary and Matt Gooderson – has released their third album again for Village Green Recordings. The term ‘post-minimalist’ is sometimes used to describe this collective, →
CD – raster
Mika Tapio Vainio, who passed away in April 2017, was one of the musicians and experimenters who most influenced the new electronic aesthetic of the nineties, grafting glitch elements and fomenting a minimal but aggressive techno, infused →
LP – Minus Habens
This latest release by Ivan Iusco was recorded in his Los Angeles studios. Synthagma features twelve tracks, three of which (“Head On Fire”, “Fly’s Heart” and “The Other Side”) are written in collaboration with Kid Moxie, →
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 – 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 →
Vinyl 12″ – Not On Label
For Roman Jungblut, a musician and media/sound artist native of Cologne, Back To Where It Never Started is the first solo project where he uses his real name, after years of collaborations with different →
CD – Own Release
The themes of introspection, transformation and renovation were already inspirations for Vitor Joaquim’s previous release Impermanence, and for his project HAN, in partnership with Emídio Buchinho. His new release Nothingness, a solo project, is a poetic →
CD – Kvitnu
Oksastus is a precious reprint of a historical release by Pan Sonic. It was originally published by Kvitnu in 2014, four years after the group officially disbanded. Their last official album, Gravitoni was released in 2010, while →
CD – King Tree
Can some obsessive and repetitive sound sequences impress themselves on the listener so much that their continuous repetition creates space for more synthetic, rhythmic and sharp moments? Clearly the composer Ryan Teague, a native of Bristol, →
