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.
MiniCDr – Electroton
In spite of being a limited edition of just 100 copies, this MiniCDr published by Electroton focuses the attention of international audiences on another interesting Ukrainian electronic experimenter. It’s not the first time that the German label →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1849660396, English, 224 pages, 2013, UK
It seems that our ancestral attachment to nature has not been forgotten, especially if you look at how we use natural metaphors to name technological products and services. We even integrate →
CD – Nux Org
Edging: Soundtrack For Dance Theatre Piece, with choreography by Guillaume Marie/TAZCORP, was released to coincide with the preview of the same piece at the Festival Les Inaccoutumés in Paris, on November 19th and 20th 2013. The →
If you thought art might some day really get under your skin you were right. Anthony Antonellis, an American artist who says he “lives and works on the Internet”, developed a gallery in a chip, which he wears under his →
CD – Moozak
Marin Key, aka Mountain Black, weaves a series of dense and rarefied cinematic evolutions in Closing In, his debut album. The album was released by Moozak, an experimental label established in spring 2008 in Vienna that also →
Printon Printinghouse Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-9529323135, English/Finnish, 256 pages, 2013, Estonia
This is the first in a series of publications originating from a specific “field” laboratory at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland/Finland. Invited by the Finnish Society of Bioart, a →
CD – Denovali
Under the moniker Piano Interrupted are the pianist and composer Tom Hodge from London and the French electronic producer Franz Kirmann. Electronics, pop, techno, classic culture and minimalism converge in their musical trajectory: a potpourri of sounds →
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 →
