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 – LOM
These recordings date back to 2010 and were originally intended to be used as material for an audiovisual installation at the Exhibition of Mining at the National Technical Museum in Prague. The project, unfortunately, was never realised →
servus.at – kunst und kultur im netz, book, ISBN 978-3950420036,English, 96 pages, 2024, Austria
The international movement of hacktivists operating servers began in the early, pioneering days of the pre-internet and continued into the era of the →
CD – Soleilmoon
Nikola Tesla’s legacy is a symbolic device, a device that continues to radiate potential. His experiments do not remain confined to the domain of technique, but are articulated as thought in the form of energy, as →
Fundação MEO, ISBN 978-9729968594, English, Portuguese, 204 pages, 2025, Portugal
Still largely unacknowledged by official art history and the contemporary art scene, (inter)net art remains relevant to scholars and institutions, who recognise its visionary and →
CD – Dissipatio
Distant recordings captured in Norway and subsequently interwoven with studio sessions – thanks to a self-built crystal radio, accompanied by light, detectors, motors and antennas – give life to a technological and sound transposition of the Northern →
Set Margins, book, ISBN 978-9083449807, English, 208 pages, 2024, The Netherlands
There has been particular attention paid to energy in scientific and artistic circles, understandably due to its universal quality. This attention has been greatest →
CD – Serotine
Anthony Laguerre and Les Percussions de Strasbourg construct in Myotis V an amplified percussion device that weaves both organic and electronic sounds, dilated free form sequences and electroacoustic whispers, exotic noises and minimalist translations. On his first →
FLEE Project, book+CD, ISBN 978-2956967774, English, 166 pages, 2025, Switzerland
The African galaxy of media production has often been represented in Western societies, particularly in Europe, through exhibitions and initiatives that reveal theories and →
6CD – Auryfa | Metaphon
Poly-Art Recordings 1976-1982 is a 6-CD set curated by Auryfa and Metaphon. It brings together for the first time, a reissue of the series of self-produced cassettes and vinyl records by the Romanian-French composer Costin →
Studio Joost Rekveld, Brussels, KASK & Conservatorium Gent, ISBN 978-9491564185, English, 176 pages, 2025, The Netherlands
If you follow Joost Rekveld on social media, you will often be surprised not only by the complex technical →
