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.
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 →
There are so many ways to let our personal data get out of control. The more we have tacitly accepted that it is no longer important not to share important details about ourselves, the more our digital persona has been →
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 →
The cyberpunk science fiction movement distinguished itself from the classic SF in some political stances, often incorporating geopolitics and technological dissent into its stories. The claim that parts of what it envisioned have become reality is quite easy to argue →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN 978-1501345418, English, 136 pages, 2023, UK
The COVID isolation experience was a fairly universal condition for a while, brutally interrupting our mostly programmed and regular way of living, along with the perception →
CD – Mille Plateaux
In 2000, Thomas Köner was awarded the New Media Prize by the Montreal International Festival of New Cinema and New Media, a recognition that undoubtedly helped his career which he began as a sound engineer for →
In our rekindled need to connect with nature, there are artists who show us how to do this literally, and Andreas Tegnander is certainly one of them. His sound installation Flora Ex Machina allows us to experience Beatrixpark in Amsterdam →
Goldsmiths Press, ISBN 978-1913380144, English, 400 pages, 2023, UK
The pace of change in the ever-shifting global ecology of media has increased dramatically with the ubiquitous role of social media-driven smartphones. Information flows have mutated →
double cassette box – Corvo
The Asocial Telepathic Ensemble is a collective founded in 2021 during the Covid-19 lockdowns. For their first release, founding members Alessandra Eramo and Brandon LaBelle, are joined by James Webb, →
Neural 74, Connective Theories, 30 years of Neural + extra: 30 Artists Celebrate 30 Years of Neural + 20 of Crónica . Subscribe now!
Issue #73, 2023 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: 30 →
The subscribers will find an exceptional object attached to the centrefold: a flexi disc. It constitutes a small dream come true: after so many years we have been able to produce an official music release in full, making it also →
Oversized masses of indestructible plastic have become a symbol of both human overproduction and our endangered future. Song from Plastic by the duo UJOO+LIMHEEYOUNG is an installation with a device that can record and play back sounds, using the same →
