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.
Breathing new life back into obsolete and forgotten technology in media arts projects has seen a surge of increased activity in recent years. A kind of technological remix culture combined with a DIY hacking mentality has facilitated the resurrection of →
CD – Amalgamated Torso And Such
DIY devices, abrasive frequencies, heavy sounds, noisy and persistent; here are 74 minutes of absolute experimental anarchy spawned by devices powered by two nine-volt batteries and made from parts available in normal electronic supplies →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1841507088, English, 144 pages, 2013, UK
Many philosophical questions raised by the nanoscale (or nanoscopic scale, where the nanometer is a billionth of a meter) are connected to its intrinsically challenging nature: it represents a shift to →
Pirate radio stations know that if they cannot keep their gear on the move, their days are counted. Locating the source of radio transmissions is a technique developed during the First World War and still employed by law enforcement agencies →
DVD-ROM, Kvitnu, 2013, Ukraine
Binmatu is a project by Slovak sound artist Jonáš Gruska, musician, visual performer, founder of the LOM label and developer of open source computer instruments and artistic software. So it’s understandable why this dvd has been →
Black Dog Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1908966230, English, 304 pages, 2013, UK
One commonality in the different definitions of “postdigital” is that it is definitively getting rid of the material/immaterial dichotomy introduced in the early stages of digital. This dichotomy has →
In Self-Portrait, a new media installation by Bostjan Čadež presented in December 2013 at the Institute for Contemporary Art in Ljubljana, a computer placed on a chair in front of a mirror looks at its mirrored image through a webcam. →
CD – Herbal International
A battery, his own voice, some metallic items, a radio, a mixer, several touch microphones, a magnetic reel, a speaker, a computer, some chairs and some plastic bags: these are the raw materials used by Jason →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816679003, English, 224 pages, 2013, USA
The popular discourse about social media and their impact has slowed the analysis of networks as the fundamental structures lying underneath. But social networks have also evolved digital networks →
“Money is a social construct that largely exists in people’s minds” Brett Scott
Money Watching (2007) was a performance by Cesare Peitrousi as part of the series ‘Paradoxical Economies’ by Ikon Gallery. A shop in a commercial area of Birmingham was →
CD – LINE
Behind the moniker of Pinkcourtesyphone there is Richard Chartier, whose name is well known in the scene of digital electronic reduction. This author has a history of experimenting with the interconnections between the spatial nature of sound, →
US + is a plug-in for the popular video chat service Google Hangout, born from the collaboration between Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald. After the very easy installation,US + appears in the chat window as a simple application. Users see →
Gylphi Limited, ISBN-13: 978-1780240091, English, 304 pages, 2013, USA
Man/machine interfaces have involved the body in progressively more sophisticated ways, from the mechanical finger pressure on a keyboard to the intellectual challenge of voice-recognition-based software assistants. Media art has interpreted →
CD – Runningonair
In recent evolutions of experimental music we have perceived a renewed interest in the “tintinnabuli style”, an approach to composition conceived by Arvo Pärt, an Estonian master of contemporary music. The term tintinnnabuli is intentionally onomatopoeic and →
