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 71, Strange Weathers (co-edited with Daphne Dragona, Jussi Parikka). Subscribe now!
Issue #71, Winter 2022 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Tresor, ISBN 978-3985954773, English, 352 pages, 2022, Germany
Techno and Berlin just go together. This alliance has influenced a worldwide movement of music, aesthetics, technology and culture that has shaped an entire generation. In the →
CD – Unsounds
Asbestos was used by the ancient Romans to wrap corpses before cremating them, in order to obtain thinner and whitish-looking ashes. This nugget of information is probably not widely known. What is well known is how millions →
Many artists have begun to reflect a growing empathy towards plants, possibly the result of a new connection with nature triggered by the climate crisis. “La plante” by Baron Lanteigne is a virtual representation of a plant using a custom-made →
The University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-1517909956, English, 330 pages, 2022, USA
In 1962, an exhibition entitled “Arte Programmata: Arte Cinetica, Opere Moltiplicate, Opera Aperta” (Programmed Art: Kinetic Art, Multiple Works, Open Work), curated by →
CD – Dekorder
In Nighturns, the latest recording by Un Caddie Renversé dans l’Herbe, the moniker of Bilal Dídac P. Lagarriga, the combination of African instruments – such as balaphon, mbira and kalimba – together with the use of →
Artists working with virtual reality have often called to question the user’s perception of their work, challenging the industrial paradigm of immersive virtual space. Alexander Schubert‘s Sleep Laboratory is designed for a group of ten people to lie in a →
Les presses du réel, ISBN 978-2378962135, English, French, 512 pages, 2022, France
There is a growing interest in scores. Scores were revolutionised from the 1960s onwards as an artistic format to be explored. They are →
2LP – Sofa Music
mind is moving (IV) presents four conceptual scores by Michael Pisaro-Liu, written in 1996 and performed by the contrabassist Michael Francis Duchte in 2019. Here, a total of 60 sounds for double bass are inserted. Each →
Lauren Lee McCarthy & Kyle McDonald bring a welcome human element to the domain of machine intelligence. In “Unlearning Language, the pair deliberately overturn the current paradigm imposed by technology industry. McCarthy and McDonald programme an AI that →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262543415, English, 432 pages, 2022, USA
Today’s literary genres are not so easily recognisable. More than ever, they are tied to the medium that houses them, and thus to different schemes, →
CD – Bam Balam
A vortex of sounds in the first track, “Coda” drags the listener into noise, through fuzzy and calibrated drones, brought together with an almost sacred chord progression. The following track, “Postcoda”, is equally beatific, →
Artist David Bowen’s installation Plant Bot experiments with the time and ways of interdependence between a plant and a system consisting of a robotic arm, a video camera and a computer. The video camera, mounted on the robotic arm, observes →
University of Pennsylvania Press, ISBN 978-0812253412, English, 140 pages, 2021, USA
A bitstream is any “contiguous sequence of bits for storage or transmission”, like a file or an entire hard disc image. This expression, used →
CD – Persistence Of Sound
From Dusk Till Dawn is a posthumous album showcasing the creative and experimental flair of Ian Rawes, a field recordist who passed away on October 19, 2021. The eight tracks presented here are all the →
