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.
DVD – ((audience))
Written as a quadrophonic audio work in three movements, Cricket, Tree, Crow explores the vocal mimicry of the sounds produced by members of these species, focusing on the imitation of forms of expression unnatural for human vocal →
During the last edition of Transmediale festival in Berlin, the foyer of HKW was occupied by numerous theodolite scopes and data viewers, used to reveal to the audience different correlations of data. The graphs, charts and measurements presented and supported →
Including everything from psychoacoustics and sound topology to neural networks and philosophy of language, Florian Hecker has lately been setting up installations and performances internationally. Even though his work may appear as diligent, academic studies into various sonic materials Hecker →
Recent graduate of the Royal College of Art Minsu Kim has created an experimental project that explores the possibilities of sensory interaction between humans and machines. The work, which was completed in June 2013, investigates a mode of communication by →
What is there in common between our current obsession with data (as pertaining to the debates surrounding privacy and social media) and the fetishism for vinyl expressed in record collecting? The idea that an immaterial process can be stockpiled carries →
CD – Auditory Field Theory
The audio captures of Francisco Meirino in An Extended Meaning For Something Meaningless become almost inessential – in this case the experimentation is focused on the audio spectrum: the electronics here are static and immanent, →
Neural 20th anniversary issue is bigger than usual with visionary interviews and article published in its first decade and available for the first time in English. Subscribe now!
Issue #46, Autumn 2013 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get the unique “First →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822353928, English, 304 pages, 2013, USA
In the small galaxy of noise music, there’s a specific, ideal place for dealing with its edge, pushed by the intrinsic extreme nature of noise itself. In the imagination of →
CD+ booklet – Touch
Many people know Chris Watson as part of the Cabaret Voltaire and the Hafler Trier, as well as for being an able field recordist. He has recently created two new works under the umbrella of Touch. The first →
Acoustic design is an empirical business, but regardless of its experimental foundation, concepts related to high-fidelity have to a large extent kept applied acoustics in a subservient role, limiting the scope of the discipline to solving problems originating within other →
CD/Deluxe Packaging – Winds Measure
We are immediately seduced by the artwork of Boombana Echoes, a project comprising field recordings, drums and electronics recorded live on December 12th 2005. The first of the three compositions by Akio Suzuki and Lawrence →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262018876, Finnish, 296 pages, 2013, English
The language challenge of spam is one of the most underestimated experiments in man-machine relationships. Spam is mainly triggered by the self-feeding appetite for algorithmically generated money, from the classic →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Combining electronic music and classical instruments is a trend that has been consolidated by international avant-garde movements. Within this field Stavros Gasparatos is well known for his skill in subtly balancing the two elements. His work →
1000hz is a frequency commonly used as a test tone in audio perception experiments. Rigorous research into human sensitivity to sound and auditory thresholds has often used 1000Hz as a reference point for determining the quietest tones a person with →
