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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CD – Sub Rosa
Ata Ebtekar, aka Sote, is an Iranian–American electronic music composer and sound artist with releases on a diverse range of labels including Warp, Opal Tapes, Diagonal, Mute and Morphin. He is also the co-founder of the →
As in previous media-centric conflicts, the various layers of propaganda expressed during the war in Ukraine have been echoed in the media, often in their most crudest or nightmarish forms. PropaGAN is a sophisticated machine created by Egor Kraft. It →
CD – Persistence of Sound
A World Behind This World is an adaptation of a radio piece produced for the Scottish Sculpture Workshop in 2021. The soundscape presented over the four tracks features different audio captured during the aforementioned workshop →
Verlag Kettler, ISBN 978-3862069965, English, 208 pages, 2022, Germany
‘Ai […] extrapolates potential futures out of past data’, write the three editors of this exhibition catalogue of the same name. This sounds like one of →
CD – Denovali
Three years since his last release, Orson Hentschel returns with his latest offering, Heavy Light. The eight tracks on this album range from dreamy, spaced-out soundscapes to metallic, harsh rhythms. The album is part of a →
The representation of the disconnection between spaces in virtual reality has been a concern since its inception. In Reconnection, Chun Hua Catherine Dong demonstrates the separation and reconciliation between perceived space, physical space and their associated meanings. The elements of →
Cassette – Crónica
This is the first solo release from sound artist Morten Riis, since 2009’s Digital Sound Drawings, a project that focused on the visual waveforms of songs, featuring six songs that were composed by converting a series of →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775751667, Italian, 212 pages, 2021, Germany
This small-format book was published to accompany the TECHNO exhibition at Museion in Bolzano and is edited by Bart van der Heide, who is also the →
CD – 901 Editions
Haptic, the experimental group comprised of Steven Hess, Joseph Clayton Mills and Adam Sonderberg, return with their eighth album, Ladder of Shadows. Since forming in 2006, the trio have traversed the boundaries between composition and improvisation →
Dylan Sheridan‘s kinetic sound art consists of precarious DIY machines, unpredictable automatisms and noises that are welcome amidst other, mostly dissonant sounds. In Random Impulse, a microphone is thrown around by an air compressor with whipping trajectories. This may be →
Cassette – Domizil
In over thirty different excursions Claudio Landolt has accumulated more than one hundred hours of recordings in the vicinity of the Vorder Glärnisch, a mountain that dominates the Linth Valley in the Swiss Alps. The audio-capturing techniques →
Sternberg Press – Edith-Russ-Haus für Medienkunst, ISBN 978-3956795886, German, English, 376 pages, 2022, UK
This edited artist’s monograph is dedicated to Zach Blas, an artist and writer whose work explores technology and politics. Published after →
The underground communications infrastructure of the internet is made up of cables and has been the most important material through which we understand how information flows since the telegraph. Mimi Ọnụọha‘s work uses technology to reveal social relationships and power →
CD – Prostir
‘Assemblage Tremor’, the first track on Radness Method, the latest solo work from Dmytro Fedorenko, aka Kotra, is a relentless and fierce introduction and brings us back to the early days of the Ukrainian artist’s career. Ritual →
