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 – Noton
‘There is no defense, opposition, or rejection to the hubris of the hybrid form’. This was a comment from our review of the previous release in this series, which began in 2021 and propels Alva Noto back →
LP + booklet – Die Schachtel
The Color of Pomegranates, the second work of Soviet director Sergei Parajanov, is a film from the end of sixties, now a cult movie from a time when it was difficult to be an →
3 x vinyl + booklet – Code
Accompanied by a 12-page booklet, featuring a written contribution from Etienne Menu along with a series of explanatory texts introducing each individual work, this triple vinyl release from Jérémie Arcache and Leonardo Ortega, →
LP – Subtext
James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, aka Emptyset, mark the fiftieth release for the Subtext label (founded by Ginzburg) with Ash. It is somewhat of a return to the label’s roots– the duo recorded the album in 2023 →
CD – Raster
The moniker ASA hides the identities of Uwe Schmidt, Arturo Lanz and Saverio Evangelista. Schmidt is a veteran of electronics in its various declinations, with an impressive number of productions, an artist who anticipated the genesis of →
2CD – Cellule 75
In the next future the curators of a hypothetical exhibition focusing on the most significant art works generated during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 could not avoid selecting this MM∞XX Vol.1 & 2, published by →
LP + single-sided 10″ – Ergot
The sound artists Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, who passed in 2019 at the venerable age of ninety-one years old, spent together almost 50 years working together in significant projects and publications, already from →
LP – Prensa Manual
Diego Behncke sets up a complex grid of sets, choices, and musical actions with the use of the texts of Foirades/Fizzles, a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, that gave life to what is considered →
CD – Mind Travels Series
It’s not the first time Robin Rimbaud, also known under the alias Scanner, carries some musical collaborations outside of the usual borders, for example the most recent and a bit ambient “South London Original” with →
cassette – Noumenal Loom
Carmen Jaci is a French-Canadian artist now resident in the Netherlands. She is at ease mixing a wide range of acoustic instruments, synths and vocal recordings in a coherent and imaginative way. With academic riguor, she →
