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 – Touch
Bana Haffar was born in the 1980s in Saudi Arabia, but has lived in North Carolina since early childhood. After years of study as a classical violinist she switched to the electric bass and in 2014 to →
CD – Transacoustic Research
What role does spoken language play in the age of the pervasive electronic surveillance? Darkvoice is an album and collection of videos questioning this theme. Specifically, Jörg Piringer tries to focus on an electronic cipher, a →
LP – SVS
Crocodile by Munich born Sebastian Schnitzenbaumer, aka BELP, demonstrates a refined and niche electronics, hovering between radical experimentalism and rhythmical musicality. Founded by Benedikt Brachtel and Daniel Hermann-Collini in 2013 and focused on the organisation of artistic →
CD – Denovali
Elektro Guzzi is a guitar, bass and drums trio consisting of Bernhard Breuer, Bernhard Hammer and Jakob Schneidewind. This music combo wants to go beyond the border between analog and digital and create a sort of live →
LP – Urbsounds
The electronics of the Slovakian Michal Lichý, aka Urbanfailure, is roady, cybernetic and abstract. An artist working on the scene from the end of the nineties, he produces a rapid series of raw rhythms and multiform sequences, →
CD – Ici D’Ailleurs/Mind Travels
Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Ardecore) and Timothy Lewis, aka Thighpaulsandra (Coil) already worked together last year on December 2017, with Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness for Consouling Sounds. The same dark ambient sensitivity is in →
CD – Om Kult
When some sounds clearly remind us of “psyco-magic enchantments and occult yoga instructions” and at the same time take inspiration from to practices of electronics and noisy esoteric subgenres, it’s impossible not to think to William →
CD – DenovaliRDTK is the alias of two good old friends, Ricardo Donoso and Thiago Kochenborger, who finally had the opportunity to work together for this album, produced by Denovali Records. Both natives of Brazil, long since moved on →
CD – Kvitnu
At first listening, synthetic repetitions and ritual atmospheres, a bit dark and churchy, welcome us, and later gradually become more spatial, vibrating and cosmic. A continuous tremor, as though it was the result of a delirious and →
LP – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French →
