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 – Gruenrekorder
Helgoland in German literally means “holy land” and is an island located south-east of the North Sea, originally owned by Denmark and later by the United Kingdom, before being given to Germany in 1890 as part of a →
Pogus, CD+DVD, ASIN: B00BCNWPIY, 2013
Brian Chase, the drummer for the Yeah-Yeah-Yeahs band has accurately titled this release, which explores the type of drones produced by drums tuned to specific pitches, before processing them with computer and loudspeakers. He explores →
Kyle E Evans’ oscillographic synthesizer, the de/Rastra, consists of a circuit-bent CRT TV linked to a computer running a MAX/MSP patch to enable discreet cross-wiring of audio and video signals. The chassis of the TV has been modified to incorporate →
CD + Booklet – Denovali
Behind the moniker ‘The Eye of Time’ there is no-one but Marc Euvrie, a French musician who has been associated with the punk and hardcore scenes. We remember him from bands such as Aussitôt Mort, →
The MIT Press, USA, ISBN-13: 978-0262018517, 464 pages, 2013, English
Erkki Huhtamo is a universally acknowledged media archaeologist. This book is the result of very extensive research (done in the last twenty-five years) into the “moving panoramas”, huge rolls of →
CD – Sub Rosa
In YZ3Z2Z1S2, a Five-letter Sufi Word, Jean-Luc Fafchamps has arranged a number of musical movements that entail different solo combinations. This is the second project in a specific series made for Sub Rosa by Ictus Ensemble →
Anyone who has gone through New York in recent months may be unaware of Heather Dewey-Hagborg‘s Stranger Visions. This is a project that exacerbates the concept of surveillance, allowing it to creep into our most private and intimate sphere: our →
Uniformbooks, ISBN-13: 978-0956855961, 240 pages, 2013, English
The boom in the production of field recording releases has generated a lot of attention in its, history, significance and the divergent approaches employed by artists, musicians and scientists. The discussion has produced →
On 16 January 2013 a parcel was shipped from the borough of Hackney to the Ecuadorian Embassy, final recipient: Julian Assange. The package contained a phone which, through a hole in the box, photographed the surrounding environment every ten seconds, →
CD – Sub Rosa
“Fog Horns” is the eleventh release in the Framework collection – an extension of Sub Rosa’s Concrete Electronics Noise series. This work showcases elaborations by Luca Forcucci, an Italian-Swiss sound artist whose work often combines installations, →
Continuum, ISBN-13: 978-1441148636, 224 pages, 2012, English
There’s an interesting quote by Pascal Guignard in this book which seems to epitomize its spirit: “Sound is the territory where one does not contemplate”. It might sound controversial if considered out of →
CD – Aagoo
Fernando Corona is a Mexican electronic experimenter and multi-instrumentalist. Here he is in combination with Philippe Petit, a versatile musician, journalist and DJ from Marseille, the founder of BiP_HOp Records (as well as Pandemonium) and member of →
Paolo Cirio enjoys exploits. In many ways he is a virtuoso player of contemporary networks, investigating and exposing their inner workings, locating their vulnerabilities and subverting their functionality. In his latest project, Loophole 4 All , Cirio focused on an →
CD – Museu Serralves
The accuracy, the dark charm and the structural organization of the sounds of Marc Behrens are immediately recognizable in Irregular Characters from the first moments of listening. The work stands out for its absolute quality and →
