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.
Wood is unique in its acoustic properties. Coupled with its aesthetic appeal, it has always been the material of choice for both musical instruments and the interiors of concert halls. Roberto Pugliese‘s multi-channel sound sculpture, Concerto Per Natura Morta, consists →
CD – Hubro
Improvised music in fine form courtesy of Labfield, a duo originally formed by Swedish guitarist David Stackenäs (Territory Band, Seval, Fire! Orchestra) and Norwegian percussionist Ingar Zach (Huntsville, Dans Les Arbres, Arve Henriksen, Erik Honoré ), now →
EYE Film Institute Netherlands, ISBN-13: 978-9071338007, English, 240 pages, 2013, The Netherlands
Oskar Fischinger has long been a pivotal figure in “visual music,” surely a pioneer, well ahead of his time. Acknowledged as an “experimental animator and filmmaker,” he innovated →
Artistic work addressing synaesthesia and the interrelation of the senses, starting from visual music, has often been based on the notion that light and sound are both vibratory phenomena, one mechanic and the other electromagnetic, and as such can be →
CD – Hideous Replica
Recorded in Berlin between 2013 and 2014, this album by Argentine musician Lucio Capece includes two extended compositions of approximately 26 and 21 minutes in which we recognise analogue synthesizers, oscillators, a ring modulator, an equaliser →
adocs publishing, ISBN: 9783943253092, English, 80 pages, 2014, Germany
As a result of the Global Prayers project on the manifestation of religion in urban spaces, sound artist Gilles Aubry has conducted extensive research into Christian charismatic churches in Kinshasa, (D.R. →
“Mirage” by Ralf Baecker is a complex project (in the true tradition of this artist) using optics and artificial intelligence to form a “projection apparatus.” It uses a ‘fluxgate magnetometer’ to detect the earth’s magnetic field, feeding it into a →
24xCD (box set) – Baskaru
Frank Rothkamm’s conceptual excursions are consistently surprising. Last time it was Reno that made us jump, a muzak album that certainly does not occupy first place in the German composer’s discography. Prior to that release →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262027007, English, 312 pages, 2014, USA
Jon Ippolito is a key figure in the preservation of both (new) media and net art, involved in many of the early efforts to understand the technical problems associated with →
Is media art the retirement home for obsolete technologies? Liberated from the alienating effects of usefulness, our throwaway consumer electronic devices sometimes find a new life only after being replaced by a newer generation of gadgets. Stephen Cornford has been →
