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 – Futura Resistenza
A series of dark, ethereal and spectral sequences on ‘A Wrong Turn Towards Eternity’, the 10-minute opening track introduce us to the latest work by Glaswegian sound artist Mark Vernon. Vernon is accustomed to a form →
CD – Alltagsmusik
The Kilpatrick Phenol is a synthesizer released around 2015, and therefore not strictly related to the vast category of vintage electronic instruments that are often the focus of disproportionate attention these days and which, apart from the →
10” – arbitrary
This is the second in a series of collaborations, released on 10″ vinyl in the guise of remixes, by Mads Emil Nielsen and Chromacolor. Nielsen is a musician/composer from Copenhagen accustomed to bold projects using sound sources →
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 →
CD – Room40
Under the moniker Amby Downs, Tahlia Palmer presents Ngunmal and I Am Holding My Breath on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The two compositions last almost 29 and 21 minutes respectively, and were designed both by virtue of →
cassette – Gruenrekorder|K7
DinahBird and Jean-Philippe Renoult’s focus here is on early radio transmission technologies. These technologies are now being updated by virtue of the need of the world of finance to transfer data at ever higher speeds – attainable →
cassette – Ricerca Sonora
Filippo Lilli and Donato Loforese, aka Polisonum, remind us that sounds by their nature are connected to the uniqueness of events. You must be present and know how to grasp the moment in which an acoustic →
cassette – Anunaki Tabla
This is the first solo release from Kenn Hartwig, bassist and member of various bands such as Das Ende Der Liebe, C.A.R., Enjuti, Center for Mind and Brain, and Shiva And The Destroyer. Hartwig has a →
LP – iDEAL
In a time of retromania and fetishization of the offline, it is logical that some electronic artists are interested in vintage instruments and performance techniques that have nothing to do with modern digital setups. In the case →
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 →
