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 – Fylkingen
Moscow to Vladivostok by train is quite a long journey, more than 9000 kilometers to be precise. The Trans-Siberian is the railway connecting the two cities. Susanne Skog could have surprised us with more variegated and adventurous →
CD – Sub Rosa
The Noise Of Art: Works For Intonarumori is a collaborative project made together by the Czech ensemble Opening Performance Orchestra, Blixa Bargeld, Luciano Chessa and Fred Möpert. This unusual collective wants to pay homage to the →
CD – Zoharum
Zoharum has a quite eclectic relationship with its releases, alternating proposals from different electronic scenes: ambient, minimal, industrial, dub and experimental. 78-Angst, for example, is a conceptual collection of productions Patryk Gęgniewicz (Revisq) and Lukasz Szalankiewicz (Zenial) →
CD – 4AD
In her previous two albums – Movement and Platform – Holly Herndon has already demonstrated her vocal control in a very original and structured way, despite the use of distortions, effects and extreme edits. She was perfectly →
Vinyl – Mego
Peter Rehberg, the owner and founder of the label Editions Mego, is behind the moniker Pita. Since the mid nineties he has been a prolific composer but he is more moderate in his solo releases producing only →
LP – Sonic Pieces
On the perilous crest connecting the conceptual fields of the drone music, dark ambient, experimental and modern classical genres, Jakob Kirkegaard and We Like We – a collective composed of Josefine Opsahl, Katinka Fogh Vindelev, Katrine →
CD – Denovali
Samuel van Dijk, aka Mohlao and VC-118A, returns with the moniker Multicast Dynamics and releases his fifth album with Denovali. From the first sequences, the environmental approach is clear. There is a recognition of some abstract sidereal →
The space for politics has shrunk, either ’deported’ to social media and online spaces in general, self-ghettoized in homogeneous circles or lost in the crowd of leaders’ profiles, not to mention the pollution of human and bot paid troll armies. →
CD – Protagoniste
The clarinetists Xavier Charles and Jacques Di Donato had already worked together in the nineties, releasing also an album, “Du Slavon Glagol”, published in 1996 by Khôkhôt. Now they are back for Protagoniste with fourteen new compositions, →
LP – Le Cabanon
Written, produced and mixed in the Northeast of Madagascar by Clovis Lemée, a musician and co-director of Cabanon Records, aka Horla, this LP is a tribute to the savage nature, animism and mysterious essence of this →
