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 – raster
Mika Tapio Vainio, who passed away in April 2017, was one of the musicians and experimenters who most influenced the new electronic aesthetic of the nineties, grafting glitch elements and fomenting a minimal but aggressive techno, infused →
CD – In Paradisum
Philippe Hallais, an electronic musician and Honduran DJ based in Paris, also performs under the monikers Erwan Tarek, B-Ball Joints and Low Jack. Hallais is an eclectic artist who does not disdain live performances in clubs →
CD – Sub Rosa
Compared to the previous decade, the eighties were a period of political and philosophical retreat. However, during this period, many experimental trends were still in play, especially among the counter-cultural groups located in the main European →
CD – Crónica
GML Variations by Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela stems from an initial composition presented alongside other works in a public screening at the Casa da Música, in Porto. The focus of this event was the Robotic Gamelan, →
Cassette – Birmingham Record Company
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells’ performance art is unusual and surprising. The two artists produced a simple and powerful outcome whose sonic implications are very engaging. The performance is also very significant in terms of →
LP – Minus Habens
This latest release by Ivan Iusco was recorded in his Los Angeles studios. Synthagma features twelve tracks, three of which (“Head On Fire”, “Fly’s Heart” and “The Other Side”) are written in collaboration with Kid Moxie, →
12” Vinyl – Music Information Centre Lithuania
The Aidija chamber choir pays homage to Bronius Kutavičius, one of the most important figures of Lithuanian musical culture, a composer largely inspired by “cultural archaeology”, from the national polytheistic tradition and at →
CD + book – Fancyyyyy
With a packaging whose design is due to Joe Gilmore and Florian Hecker’s refined font manipulation, printed in two distinct colors, metallic silver and black, with a thirty-page booklet written by Curtis Roads, himself a →
CD – Important
All of the tracks on this release from Mo H. Zareei (mHz) derive their names from mathematical functions which in turn are used to generate the sounds and give form to tonal and rhythmic structures. The raw →
CD – Unsounds
What is the thin line dividing a live performance, a studio work and being part of an artistic installation where a large number of people can participate? Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor opted for a halfway position →
