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.
cassette – Anunaki Tabla
This is the first solo release from Kenn Hartwig, bassist and member of various bands such as Das Ende Der Liebe, C.A.R., Enjuti, Center for Mind and Brain, and Shiva And The Destroyer. Hartwig has a →
LP – iDEAL
In a time of retromania and fetishization of the offline, it is logical that some electronic artists are interested in vintage instruments and performance techniques that have nothing to do with modern digital setups. In the case →
Galerie der Abseitigen Künste/Mille Plateaux, book+USB card, ISBN 978-3948478193, English, 64 pages, 2023, Germany
The electric guitar has been playing a structural role for music especially in the second half of the 20th century, and →
LP + booklet – Die Schachtel
The Color of Pomegranates, the second work of Soviet director Sergei Parajanov, is a film from the end of sixties, now a cult movie from a time when it was difficult to be an →
CD + print – arbitrary
Mesmer is an experimental trio fascinated by the transience of sounds and the different contexts – be they natural or from cultural environments – that their musical practices traverse.
With Emil Jensen on trumpets, modular →
LP – Hospital Hill
Serge Tcherepnin’s Serge Modular Music Systems were one of the most iconic types of modular analog synthesizers in the seventies, instruments in which today there is still great interest – no real surprise considering the contemporary →
V2_ Publishing, ISBN 978-9082893595, English, 64 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
There are exhibitions where a research phase is carried out before the opening, focusing on the nature of the theme and not just on the →
2CD + booklet – Futura Resistenza
Accompanied by a stylish 16-page green booklet comes the latest effort from Christof Migone, a sound artist, professor, curator and writer of Swiss origin who now resides in Toronto. Wet Water (Let’s Dance) immediately →
Le Chant du Moineau, ISBN 978-2955947579, French/English, 132 pages, 2022, France
Méandre(s) took place from the 24th to the 26th of June, 2021, initiated by the ‘improvisation society’ Le Un, which brought together artists, intellectuals and →
cassette – Les Intérêts Spécifiques
Financial trading and affairs permeate all parts of society, influencing every area of human relations through schemes, tactics, and often criminal strategies. There are approximately 12,000 billion dollars hidden in tax havens, claim RYBN, a →
