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 – Baskaru
In Nouvelles Upanishads Du Yoga Emmanuel Allard has played around with different sound sources and a modular system called Buchla 200e, a new generation synthesizer well known among lovers of experimental electronics. This unusual tool is highly →
World of Warcraft (or WoW) is currently the most actively played massively multiplayer online game with about 10 millions subscribers. The dynamics that govern it are similar to the canonical rules of the online role-playing games: players, after creating a →
Anglia Ruskin University, ISBN-13: 978-0956560865, English, 80 pages, 2013, UK
“Public engagement” is a definition often used inappropriately to describe the effect of any public event with a not-completely-passive public. The Visualise program at Anglia Ruskin University and the Ruskin →
CD – LINE
Over the last decade Nicolas Bernier has consistently exhibited his sound-artist credentials in a number of different fields. Regardless of the medium of experimentation – installations, concrete music elaborations, live electronics, post-rock, noise or free improvisation, video-art, →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1441159373, English, 288 pages, 2013, USA
The book is the follow-up to “Bigger than Words, Wider than Pictures: Noise, Affect, Politics”, an international conference hosted at the University of Salford, and to its companion volume “Reverberations” published →
It’s very hard to resist the invitation to write something on the lunar surface. Moon, the work that brings together the untameable Ai Wei Wei and Olafur Eliasson allows you to do exactly this. Connecting to the website Moon it →
CD – Aural Terrains
Zafiros En El Barro is published by Aural Terrains, a label focusing on electroacoustics, improvisation and refined extreme sounds. The authors of this release are Thanos Chrysakis, Ken Slaven, James O’Sullivan and Jerry Wigens: all musicians →
book + DVD, University of Regina Press, ISBN-13: 978-0889772588, English, 240 pages, 2013, Canada
How can the immersive quality of a sound environment be defined? At the University of Regina (Canada) two series of workshops and a conference during →
2CD – Herbal International
The number of sound sources available in large harbour areas such as Le Havre in France and Liège in Belgium is immense. The coexistence of natural elements, uninhabited areas and industrial areas allow for special and →
![[Blank]-Project,-An-Experience-Of-The-Unfelt](https://neural.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Blank-Project-An-Experience-Of-The-Unfelt.jpg)
A changing sculpture of bubbles and a weirdly constructed bell catch the visitor’s eye when confronted with Soichiro Michara’s [Blank] project. The environment seems quiet, subtle and cryptic. But on closer inspection one realises that the components of the work, →
Link Editions, ISBN: 9781291577914, English, 224 pages, 2013
The Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab is probably the only contemporary collective whose output and impact come close to matching the conceptual art movement. With twenty-five active members since 2007 it →
CD – Estuary Ltd
Live electronics and tabletop guitar: these are the main elements of Stone North by Ed Osborn, a 2009 production now released by Estuary Ltd, a label focused on experimental fields that stands out for its approach →
Data DVD – LINE
Not for the first time did our office player release sounds that made us doubt that our equipment was functioning imperfectly: actually this happens quite regularly to people who focus on the contemporary experimental scenes. However →
In times of increasing online networked surveillance, the need for our disconnection and emancipation from centralized technological platforms becomes more and more crucial. One no longer feels safe when it comes to data. The news is out and the mere →
