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.
Neural 75, Artificial Corporeality (co-edited with Zane Cerpina) + extra: a postcard pointing to an AR extension of the artwork Ejector by Tim Høibjerg . Subscribe now!
Issue #75, 2024 ISSN: 2037-108X
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LP – staalplaat
The history of the mechanical music machines of the eighteenth and nineteenth century is well known also among the audience of non-specialists and its success is mostly due to the originality and quality of instruments, as the →
Over the years, Jonas Staal has created various works that enable the political empowerment of the individual through collective action. In Propaganda Station, he builds an information and meeting structure in the form of an inverted panopticon. There are ’cells’ →
Aksioma, ISBN 978-9617173406, English, 144 pages, 2023, Slovenia
The concept of scale seems to be closely linked to the concept of modernity. Once we expanded our perception of space through artificial means (especially transport and →
LP – Dischi Fantom
An unusual union was created from the meeting of essayist, editor and translator Ginevra Bompiani with sound artists Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage. The result is an original narrative with an allegorical-classical slant, where the relationships →
Can we finally consider the Yes Men’s interventions as ‘canon’? Their ever-effective interventions on capitalism’s spectacle stage continue. At the Web Summit, a man posing as an ‘adidas executive’ announced that they were ‘launching a virtual world for the underpaid →
Nero, book, Italian, 96 pages, 2021, Italia
By 1984, Frigidaire magazine was an established publication that combined an edgy, irreverent and outspoken attitude with wide newsstand circulation. Among the various experiments in the pages of the →
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 →
Trevor Paglen has developed a series of works based on the well-known ‘Psychological Operations’ (PSYOP), i.e. deceptive military operations to influence the population through the audiovisual staging of non-existent facts or events. Cyclops is the latest in this series and →
CD – Gruenrekorder
Already in the beginning of the eighties the Kraftwerk, maybe little aware of this huge anticipation, promised that, pushing a special button, a little electronic calculator might play a short melody. Actually, the theme of the music →
Strange Attractor Press, ISBN 978-1907222476, English, 156 pages, 2023, UK
The use of X-ray film to record music in Russia before 1989 has emerged in the last couple of decades, with mesmerising images of →
LP – Touch
The Blue Beyond includes two compositions the Audemars Piguet Contemporary, a prestigious Swiss watchmaking company, commissioned to the artist Jana Winderen. In the first track, “The Art of Listening: Under Water”, the idea she developed was a →
For this installation, Tania Candiani took the “logbook” of Rayuela, the iconic novel by the Argentinean Julio Cortazar, in which the author recorded the process of writing the novel, using drawings and all kinds of signs to sketch it. She →
Ejector by Tim Høibjerg is an extension of the multimedia installation of the same name, a fractal sculpture and a video work that focuses on structures found both in nature and in the digital realm. Høibjerg’s intervention in Neural is →
CD – Fylkingen
The last work by Lisa Stenberg, a Swedish artist born in Luleå, a town in the north of the country, but based in Stockholm, is released by the label Fylkingen under the form of an elegant transparent →
