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.
adocs, ISBN 978-3943253641, English, 300 pages, 2023, Germany
In his work as a sound artist and researcher, Gilles Aubry has a unique and critical perspective in assembling field recordings and historical sources through documentation that →
LP – Kohlhaas
The two tracks presented here by Giovanni Lami are the result of multiple field recordings captured during a residency held in Cotignola in the Ravenna province in Italy. Monumento Fiume adds to the already impressive catalogue of →
CD – thanatosis produktion
Following a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease, specialists advise patients to remain active and to stimulate the joints to offset the degeneration of their physical abilities. We doubt that the making of an electronic music album based →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978- 0262545075, English, 368 pages, 2022, USA
What if we could finally realise that sound is more important to humans than sight? We might begin to think that the whole Western →
CD – Crónica
Luca Forcucci is a Swiss-Italian sound artist, whose work takes the form of installations and performance, often mixing different elements to construct new relationships, compelling his listeners to engage with eccentric perspectives and sensory experiences containing infinite →
CD + art book – Cellule 75
This release by David Aird, aka Vindicatrix, for Cellule 75, a label from Hamburg founded in 2016 by Marc Richter features music made for One or Several Tigers, a performance-installation by Ho Tzu →
Torque Editions, ISBN 978-0993248771, English, 352 pages, 2022, UK
This is another publication that has emerged from the diverse and layered activities of the Furtherfield community. Their commitment to looking at the blockchain as a liberating, →
LP – Aposiopèse
Andrea Borghi manipulates VHS tapes and recorders without showing any nostalgia for the films that may have been played on these technologies. Instead, his focus is on the mechanical sounds that these media forms produce. He collects →
UV Éditions , ISBN 978-2956275381, English, 152 pages, 2022, France
Having become a conceptually even more remote place in recent decades, the perception of space has been reshaped by a handful of American private companies →
LP – Hypermedium
This project began with research by Eleni Ikoniadou, director and founder of the Audio Culture Research Unit at Kingston University in London. Ikoniadou is at ease with both contemporary art and digital culture, and in →
