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.
The process of encrypting information to improve its security is one of the modern paradigms for shielding information from the myriad possible invisible digital eyes. Epitomized by the strategy of Wikileaks on a mass media level, the fundamental doubts about →
CD – Baskaru
Toshimaru Nakamura was particularly active in the Onkyokei, a movement whose name has been translated as “sound reverberation”. This phrase was used to define the free improvisation form that took hold in Japan in the late 90s. →
![Siegfried-Zielinski-–-[...After-the-Media]](https://neural.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Siegfried-Zielinski-–-...After-the-Media.jpg)
Univocal Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1937561161, English, 275 pages, 2013, USA
Finally translated from German, this essay by Siegfried Zielinski is very involved with contemporaneity, and it presents a preeminent discourse on current media, taking into account their “relational” quality. Starting with →
CD + booklet – Domizil
You have to turn up the volume to fully perceive the first loops of Marcus Maeder’s Topographie Sinusoïdale, release by Domizil. Topography concerns itself with studying the surface shape and features of the Earth and →
Time’s Up, ISBN-13: 978-3200030756, English, 160 pages, 2013, Austria
The archival value of books is tested – for example – in the “catalogue’” concept for preserving coherent and exhaustive information about exhibitions, and in the “documentation” concept for the same →
CD – Gruenrekorder
Operating since 2002 as Merzouga, Eva Pöpplein and Janko Hanushevsky are two musicians familiar with performing laptop and instrumental improvisation – but their repertoire is not limited only to this: they have composed music for radio, cinema →
ScareMail is Benjamin Grosser’s answer to Prism: a browser extension to defend our email from surveillance by the National Security Agency. Once installed, ScareMail automatically generates a meaningless story within each email; one able to ostentatiously attract the interest of the →
CD – 4Bit Productions
The first track of Songs For William 2 by Ulrich Troyer immediately gives the listener a taste of dub. The Tyrolese artist, who has been based in Vienna for a long time, suspends himself between illustration, →
Baltan Laboratories, English, 144 pages, 2013, The Netherlands
Establishing an effective formal relationship between digital art and physical art spaces such as museums and galleries – one of the missing links in contemporary art – was the aim of “Collecting →
CD – Bed Of Nails
Released by Bed Of Nails, Under A Single Banner is the new work by Shifted, also known as Alexander Lewis, Covered In Sand, delete_everything and Pacific Blue. The artist is also known for his →
There is a strong connection between nations and bodies of people living in those nations. A territorial connection that doesn’t concern a geopolitical confine but the morphology of those territories. The national anthem is a trace of a community, or →
CD – Crónica Electronica
Miguel Carvalhais & Pedro Tudela began work on this new project edited by Crónica Electronica in May 2012, finishing in July 2013. The composition originates from work by @c for the soundtrack to OVO, a pièce →
Gestalten, ISBN-13: 978-3899554861, English, 80 pages, 2013, UK
Nicolai’s science-oriented artworks have some unique characteristics including a polarised shifting between complexity and simplicity that always deeply involves our senses. It is not by accident that his intellectual proximity to long →
CD – Aagoo
Blevin Blectum returns with her bare, adventurous and versatile electronica. Working with Aagoo Records, the artist performs intriguing and unconventional sonic sequences, taking inspiration from diverse fields. Her talent is obvious in the strong vocal lines and →
