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 – 845 Audio
The term air in music generally refers to a tune, song or more broadly to a composition. All four tracks in Airs are presented using the same pre-defined rules in terms of the structure of the →
CD/DVD – Aagoo
Kazuyuki Kishino, aka KK Null, is a Japanese experimental instrumentalist. Beginning with early noise experiments in the eighties and moving from progressive to hardcore to a kind of free form, Null has gradually embraced other improvisational techniques →
CD – Re-Records
The releases emerging from STEIM residencies in Amsterdam never fail to disappoint. Takuro Mizuta Lippit – aka dj sniff is the former artistic director of this Dutch institution dedicated to the study of electroacoustic music. Europa, the →
CD – 845 Audio
These three newly created tracks by Canadians Tim Olive (who runs the 845 label) and Anne-F Jacques feel homogenous in their inspiration and quality of sound. The sounds forming the record were amplified and manipulated by →
CD – Hideous Replica
This interesting setup consists of a small speaker being used in two different ways: to play sounds from Gregory Büttner’s computer and as Birgit Ulher’s trumpet mute. This results in the trumpet functioning as both a →
CD – Unorthodox
Alessio Riccio, a drummer and electroacoustic composer, has developed a specific free-form project for Unorthodox Recordings, which recalls the figure of the goddess Ninshubar. She is a character from Sumerian mythology and her “warrior” status has perhaps →
CD – Kontrans
Jaap Blonk is a Dutch visual/stage performer and avant-garde composer whose work is often located at a highly poignant intersection between visuals and sound poetry. Traces of Speech involved the creation of sounds by importing drawn characters →
CD – Herbal International
A battery, his own voice, some metallic items, a radio, a mixer, several touch microphones, a magnetic reel, a speaker, a computer, some chairs and some plastic bags: these are the raw materials used by Jason →
CD – Aural Terrains
Zafiros En El Barro is published by Aural Terrains, a label focusing on electroacoustics, improvisation and refined extreme sounds. The authors of this release are Thanos Chrysakis, Ken Slaven, James O’Sullivan and Jerry Wigens: all musicians →
CD – Estuary Ltd
Live electronics and tabletop guitar: these are the main elements of Stone North by Ed Osborn, a 2009 production now released by Estuary Ltd, a label focused on experimental fields that stands out for its approach →
