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 – Unorthodox
Alessio Riccio, a drummer and electroacoustic composer, has developed a specific free-form project for Unorthodox Recordings, which recalls the figure of the goddess Ninshubar. She is a character from Sumerian mythology and her “warrior” status has perhaps →
The extreme range of possible smartphones functions is fulfilling the imaginary about uncharted innovation in our daily tasks. Smartphones have replaced computers in this respect because of their innate mobile nature, opening up a completely new set of possibilities and →
CD – Estuary
Mark Cetilia is a media artist who often focuses on designing and implementing complex generative art and sound creations systems. This latest release, only 200 copies of which were printed, presents two suites both recorded live in →
In this era of abundant data, where everything – including our habits and misfortunes – constitutes material to be digitized, measured, and compared, infographics (methods for representing this data) are becoming increasingly important. One specialist in this field, data visualizer →
CD – Kontrans
Jaap Blonk is a Dutch visual/stage performer and avant-garde composer whose work is often located at a highly poignant intersection between visuals and sound poetry. Traces of Speech involved the creation of sounds by importing drawn characters →
September 11, 1973. Palacio de la Moneda, Santiago. During the bloody coup backed by the United States and led by the country’s future dictator, General Pinochet, former president Salvador Allende took his own life with a single gunshot. This last →
CD – Minus Habens
The album opens with the title track “Vulkan”, a piece characterized by the interesting voice of Carmen Buss and a series of delicate, almost ambient treatments. The sweetness of these quiet electronic sequences is followed by →
CD – Terziruolo
“The future is a monotonous instrument”, said Francis Picabia, imagining an instrument that nearly always preserves the same tone, repeating it at regular intervals. In 333 Loops Emiliano Romanelli has explored the motto of the surrealist painter →
2CD – Herbal International
The new 2-CD release by Goh Lee Kwang for Herbal International includes more than 130 minutes of abstract minimal sounds: drones, hums, acute whistles and glitches – highly synthetic elaborations that the author calls “Vurnmmkied”. The →
CD + booklet – Viaindustriae
The subtitle provides a good explanation of this work: “10 hypotheses based on 10 preliminary theses concerning activism and sound”. This hybrid-publishing project is the result of a series of workshops about new radios and →
CD – Kvitnu
Back on the scene is Argentinian experimenter Asolaar. Last year, he released an album on Metaphysik, but this latest work has been produced by Kvitnu, a Ukrainian label founded by Dmytro Fedorenko (Kotra), which has focussed on →
Neural #47 extra is A Peer-reviewed Journal About Post-digital Research (Volume 3 issue 1) (only for subscribers).
Edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen, Geoff Cox and Georgios Papadopoulos
The Post-digital condition
Florian Cramer – What is ‘Post-digital’?
Eric Snodgrass – Dusk to dawn: horizons of →
CD – LINE
Interior Field, Richard Chartier’s latest release for LINE is a refined and abstract score originally presented at the Civilian Art Projects in Washington (USA) in 2012. This is a stereo reworking of a multichannel project that was →
CD – Idiosyncratics
The raw, progressive sounds in this album are presented at pace, with very few empty moments. They form a substantial suite of four tracks (three of around 11 minutes, one lasting 15) performed in a harsh, blunt →
