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.
Sound Development, 10xbooklets, English, 120 pages, 2013, Switzerland
Sound Development annual projects are “expeditions”. We can think about them as residencies reverse engineered: instead of hosting artists within an institutional space with its own facilities and cultural connections, the artists →
CD – Re-Records
The releases emerging from STEIM residencies in Amsterdam never fail to disappoint. Takuro Mizuta Lippit – aka dj sniff is the former artistic director of this Dutch institution dedicated to the study of electroacoustic music. Europa, the →
Satoshi Nakamoto, the acknowledged creator of Bitcoin, has left only two public traces: an alleged picture and a date of birth. He strictly preserves his own privacy through an always changing IP address and using English that reveals no specific →
CD – Kaon
Eskifjörður comes to us from the label Kaon, a non-profit organisation dedicated to experimental music, both electronic and concrete. The compelling Nordic title Eskifjörður is the name of an Icelandic town nestled in the Eastern fjords. For →
Serralves/Soopa, dvd+map, English, 2013
Live performance electronic music is an artform with quite a few decades of history. Its various embodiments have created a shared space with audiences, playing with sound, location and (almost inevitably now) visuals. Technologically sophisticated performances →
CD – Line
Seth Cluett is an American sound-artist, composer and essayist. In Forms Of Forgetting his exploration of the electroacoustic genre appears to focus on very coherent and rarefied structures, described as “objects of memory”. The record becomes a →
Artist Brendon Dawes has produced a series of six devices that explore possible interactions between physical objects and the flow of receiving e-mail. The work was commissioned by MailChimp, the well-known email marketing platform. The six-object function uses the email →
CD + audio cassette in a boxset – Gagarin
Chromdioxidgedächtnis is the new release by Felix Kubin for Gagarin Records, featuring a boxset that includes both a CD and an audiocassette tape for a decidedly vintage flavor. In the early →
Cornerhouse Publications, ISBN: 978-0956957177, English, 272 pages, 2014, UK
Hinting at the liquid definition of “post-internet”, the title of this book successfully expresses the process underpinning this concept. This is an anthology with contributions from twenty-two artists who undertook a →
2CD – Denovali
Behind the enigmatic moniker Moon Zero hides the London artist, sound designer, experimental author, filmmaker and David Lynch fan Tim Garratt. The tracks on Tombs, following the thread of a rarefied and environmental inspiration, were sketched, played →
Several panels of plexiglass hang from the ceiling in succession, filled with layers of coloured gels, and inhabited by worker ants: this is the installation LIVE / WORK by Brad Tormel. The artist’s experiment consists of testing the ability of →
CD – Baskaru
Rutger Zuydervelt invites us to take a walk “through” the orchestra. Stay Tuned began life as an installation piece in which different speakers present a different group of instruments playing a single note, as if an orchestra →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262018708, English, 232 pages, 2013, USA
“Contentlessness” is more than a brave radical gesture of the past. Even if extensively articulated by Cage, Rauschenberg, Paik and many others, the act of playing with a medium without, →
CD – Aural Terrains
Created using only a piano and a computer, this Michael Edwards release for Aural Terrains is impressive listening. Self-written software was employed in the compositional process and for the management of technical skills, modulating streams of →
