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
The last work by Lisa Stenberg, a Swedish artist born in Luleå, a town in the north of the country, but based in Stockholm, is released by the label Fylkingen under the form of an elegant transparent →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262544634, English, 284 pages, 2022, USA
Digitising a musical instrument means exchanging its physical and mechanical qualities for its functionality encoded in software. This seemingly standardised process has brought about a profound →
cassette – SØVN
Giulia Francavilla is a composer, researcher, performer, and sound designer from Turin (Italy), known under the moniker of Giulia Rae, and she specialized at the Hague Sonology Institute (Netherlands), where she currently works as associate researcher. The →
2CD – Cellule 75
In the next future the curators of a hypothetical exhibition focusing on the most significant art works generated during the lockdown due to the Covid-19 could not avoid selecting this MM∞XX Vol.1 & 2, published by →
La Biennale di Venezia, ISBN 978-889727780, English, Italian, 392 pages, 2023, Italy
The catalogue of one of the Venice Biennials is an integral part of the event itself, as it brings together in a single volume →
LP + single-sided 10″ – Ergot
The sound artists Annea Lockwood and Ruth Anderson, who passed in 2019 at the venerable age of ninety-one years old, spent together almost 50 years working together in significant projects and publications, already from →
The University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0226823409, English, 220 pages, 2023, USA
As the brain seems to be slowly accepted as a target site of information transmission, the cultural influence of “intelligent” machines and the →
CD – Helical
The idea of an orchestra made of automatized instruments is not new in the history of music and technology. It’s a connection that in the nineteenth century created a craftsmanship of high specialization, modeled according to the →
nai010, ISBN 978-9462087194, English, 320 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
“The infosphere is not homogeneous, but striated”. This is one of the challenging yet fact-based concepts formulated and illustrated in Datapolis. This book, which originated as →
CD – Crónica
Multiple feedback, layers of noise and found sounds undergo several treatments being modified by a series of stereo digital delay units whose parameters (delay time, reverse, freeze, etc.) are manipulated in real time through a low-frequency oscillator →
