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.
12″ LP – Kvitnu
Hiding behind the moniker Matter, Fabrizio Matrone from Bologna is a member of Kvitnu and an electronic manipulator focused on compound electronic sounds that are highly rhythmic and analogue. This latest release follows Solid State, published →
The Incredible Bob’s art installation Parallax consists (externally) of a pair of binoculars. Its standard function however has been revolutionized (in the true sense of the word), exploiting the optical phenomenon of parallax (if you change the point of observation an →
2CD in DVD box – Monotype
Over the last few decades many people have paid homage to Albert Hofmann, the ultra-famous Swiss chemist who meritoriously synthetized LSD-25. In 1993, at the height of the rave wave that reached as far →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262518284, 192 pag, 2013, English
The fascination with “big data” – usually referring to a huge quantity of digital data and an attendant piece of powerful software that trawls it looking for new correlations – is →
University of California Press, ISBN-13: 978-0520257559, English, 344 pages, 2012, USA
Douglas Kahn is one of the most inspiring scholars dealing with sound and art. He’s able to accurately track historically compelling behind-the-scenes facts, while retrieving and connecting visionary trajectories →
CD – Rat
Our initial impressions of this intricate and suggestive work were of electroacoustic improvisations melding with jazz influences. These elaborations have been produced by an ensemble that goes under the moniker of The Bureau of Atomic Tourism, a →
The French Symbolist and proto-science-fiction writer Alfred Jarry proposed the term Pataphysics in 1893 to describe a kind of pseudo-scientific enquiry combined with a surrealist penchant for absurdity resulting in a science of imaginary solutions. Jarry’s Pataphysical Universe contains ideas →
CD – Cronica Electronica
From Crónica Electronica come ten new reinterpretations, reflecting on “the end of vinyl or the end of the world”. Although there is some underlying thematic irony here, the Portuguese label has maintained its customary formal accuracy →
König Books Ltd / Sound And Music, ISBN-13: 978-3865607065, 96 pages, 2013, English
The western imaginary about post-October revolution Russia and its liberated, flourishing cultural scenes is only partially supported by official histories. This unique book adds another important account →
CD – 12K
Behind the moniker Illuha are hidden the Japanese experimenter Tomoyoshi Date and the cosmopolitan Corey Fuller. The first works of both sound-artists date back to the second half of the last decade; so they belong to the →
Telepathy Advertising presents itself as the first communication agency specialized in extra-sensory techniques, able to convey an advertising message directly into the prospective customer’s mind. Using knowledge of neuromarketing, its promotional campaigns aim to induce the same reactions and emotions →
CD – Sub Rosa
The sound sources of this album originate from some recordings made by BJ Nilsen, Daniel Menche, Francisco López and Mika Vainio, but the tracks have come together through the additional manipulations of Novi_sad. In Neuroplanets the →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262018951, English, 248 pages, 2013, USA
Conceiving the essence of networks has been a difficult task even at the beginning of the web. The extended proliferation of amorphous asymmetrical nodes and the powerful imaginary they can →
CD – Touch / Tone 48
Many of our readers will remember Geir Jenssen as the experimenter beneath the Biosphere moniker. Considered one of ambient techno music’s main representatives, he has since shifted towards more rarefied and abstract elaborations. Stromboli →
