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 72, Machine Transparency . Subscribe now!
Issue #72, 2023 ISSN: 2037-108X
You can also subscribe to the magazine Digital Edition accessing all issues since #29.
Or you can buy the magazine from the closest of the almost 200 stores stocking →
In the past, indigenous communities’ knowledge was dismissed or removed by colonisers, if not outright destroyed, an action regretted centuries later when their cultural wealth was understood through their scattered remains. The Lights Which Can Be Heard by Sébastien Robert →
pIAR , ISBN 978-2958215408, English, 88 pages, 2022, Ghana
When an artist’s residency becomes a research project and the result goes beyond an installation, to a publication that provides historical and economic documentation, →
CD – arbitrary
Alongside various microphones, hydrophones and recorders, Richard Scott also uses some truly iconic analogue and modular synthesizers in this release. These are joined by programs such as Max/MSP and samplers, self-built controllers and effects such as a →
The spectacular complexity and context of natural processes can’t be reduced to a short video on social media. Yet we tend to think it can be, because this short and cinematic form is captivating. From a very different perspective, Leonel →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262544818, English, 336 pages, 2022, USA
During the historic ReadMe Software Art Festival in Aarhus in 2004, there was a final performance night in a small club (Musikcafeen ) where it →
CD – Cronica
There is a whole line of field recordings that are not “found” at all; that is, they are not the result of psychogeographic wanderings, but, on the contrary, are carefully prepared and have well-defined places and situations →
We are being given more and more new tools to automatically manipulate images, increasingly altering the realistic elements perceived by our brains. This fascination with altering reality seems to have an irresistible attraction, but also raises many questions about its →
i2ADS, ISBN 978-9899049253, English, 376 pages, 2022, Portugal
xCoAx is an itinerant and international conference on “Computation, Communication, Aesthetics and X”. To celebrate its 10th anniversary, the editors have published this reader and asked →
CD + book – Bisou
In Japanese mythology, Yokai are supernatural creatures that include monsters and demons, but also ghosts, spirits and guardians, magical animals or mutant humans. It is no coincidence that the term itself is made up of →
Anti-conventional approaches to computing data can transform the characterisation of a database from normative to dialectical. And the more economic value there is, the better. In Illusion of the City – Taipei, Chen Hsiangfu collected new flat floor plans of →
HOLO, ISSN 2292-0919, English, 228 pages, 2022, Germany
The third Holo magazine is dedicated to AI and its (still too few) malcontents. With the usual sophisticated content, it now appears in a smaller format. →
CD – arbitrary
This is the third release in the Black Box series from the arbitrary label. Here Mads Emil Nielsen, a Danish sound artist, has taken the opportunity to archive his compositions for theatre, alongside radio soundtracks and various →
Fungi, viruses and bacteria manage to survive in conditions that are extreme for us, feeding on sometimes unthinkable substances. Amorphotheca resinae, for example, thanks to its ability to grow on a variety of inhospitable substrates, finds fuel tanks a favourable →
MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262047401, English, 272 pages, 2022, USA
This book is a unique essay that deals extensively with art and extreme realms of food. Food has become one of the most discussed parts →
