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.
Box Set / CD – 12K
Very delicate envelopes, persuasive textures and circular, repetitive tunes: the quietist textures of the recordings by Taylor Deupree reverberate impalpably, elusively, beatifically – thanks to dreamy drones, carefully produced environmental patterns, electroacoustic resonances and →
CD + DL – FARMACIA901
Ubik is the moniker chosen by the Roman musician Marco Bonini, a guitarist and experimenter originally emanating out of the jazz tradition. Between March and August 2011, using only his instrument and a personal computer, →
Princeton University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0691155814, 278 pages, 2012, English, USA
Dismantling the almost religious belief that technology-driven security can save our lives, this book openly goes against all the dogmas coined after 9-11 and the consequent politics of fear. The →
CD – Denovali
The British cellist and experimenter, now based in Berlin and working with Denovali label, is well known in neo-classicist contemporary circles for his elegiac scores and orchestral juxtapositions (we also remember him for his recent collaboration with →
Runningonair – CDr & Data-DVD – 2012, English
Joe Evans creates music that begins with mathematics, looking into ratios in nature and translating them into sound structures. Sometimes his mathematical music experiments are conducted in parallel and the aural results →
edited by: Carsten Seiffarth, Carsten Stabenow, Golo Föllmer – PFAU Verlag, ISBN 978-3897274877, 416 pages, 2012, German, English
There was a long tradition of dismissing and repressing experimental music in Central and Eastern Europe during socialist times. And →
edited by Dieter Daniels, Inke Arns, Spector Books, ISBN: 9783940064417, 296 pages, 2012, German, English
There have been countless celebrations of the centennial of John Cage’s birth around the world, involving different generations fascinated by one of the few truly →
CD – Denovali
Piano Interrupted was the moniker chosen by London pianist and composer Tom Hodge and French electronic manipulator Franz Kiemann for the collaborative work Two By Four. The piece is divided into nine different musical scores that weave →
CD – Firework Edition
This work is based on recordings made in Lausanne, Switzerland, in an ancient school of anatomy that has been turned into a library. They were edited by Francesco Meirino himself at the Shiver Mobile studio between →
CD – Copy For Your
This is Joe Panzner’s latest solo album, the first since “Polished Rocks” (CD-R on Gameboy) and “False Positives” (Homophoni), both released in 2006. The listener immediately warms to “Clearing, Polluted”, a record with strong digital →
