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.
CD – Crónica
Shifting attention to hearing, and creating the spatial and temporal conditions aimed at encouraging this practice, placing a certain amount of care in defining an adequate social context, supporting ecological sensitivity, giving life to significant sound experiences, and in iconic spaces, designing routes that guide visitors through them, while at the same time encouraging reflection on the public’s involvement with the environment and the city. This is what Lisboa Soa, a festival of sound art, ecology, and auditory culture, has been trying to achieve since 2016 when the first edition was held at Tapada das Necessidades, a huge ten-hectare garden located between Alcântara and Estrela. In 2021, during the pandemic and the resulting restrictions, the festival commissioned four compositions from four Portuguese artists who dug into the sound archive of previous editions to create new audio scores. From these compositions was born Lisboa Soa, Sounds Within Sounds, a work on memory with an ear turned to the future. We start listening with ‘Efflux’ by João Castro Pinto, a composition lasting almost ten minutes that initially flows with delicate harmonies testing our perception before evolving into more full-bodied drones. ‘Do que Ressoa’ by Sara Pinheiro starts with various buzzing sounds, almost like insects with metallic resonances – added to them are the recordings of arrivals and departures from before and after the concerts and installations. ‘No Earlids’ from Mestre André offers an interesting journey through various material accumulated over the years, not only recordings but also ‘behind the scenes’ moments, edited and packaged in adventurous, multifaceted, and vivid overlays. ‘Splicing_archives’ by Ana Guedes concludes the selection and is the most intimate and mysterious score of this collection, even though it too makes significant use of the festival archives, filtering and processing for a total of 25 minutes making it the longest offering on the album. Lisboa Soa has now fully resumed its activities and the latest edition was dedicated to the theme Multipli.Cities, once again underlining the importance of welcoming differences and promoting coexistence between communities within urban spaces. These values are intrinsically linked to ecological processes while challenging other systemic inequalities that we all face.
Various Artists – Lisboa Soa, Sounds Within Sounds
