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.
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816670055, 248 pages, 2012, English
The concept of “virality” in networks was initially associated with the infection of computer viruses (and partly still is), before coming to describe the rapid and endemic →
An aseptic space. One white table and on it a printed directory, accompanied by an apparently normal looking telephone. It would seem the right environment to make a call. And calls are, →
CD – Helen Scarsdale
Under the moniker of Murmer hides Patrick McGinley, a field recordist who we remember for his We Share a Shadow, released in 2007 and the interesting live albums with →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822349198, 328 pages, 2012, English
Subliminal communication, or being exposed to messages too quick or hidden to be consciously perceived, is an enduringly popular topic, thanks →
CD- Ant-Zen
The record opens with the minimal sounds of a clock, its ticking mixed with very frail ambient sounds. The texture gradually fills out with overlapping recordings and other elements that reveal →
The work “deFacebook” by Indian artist Nandan Ghiya consists of a series of portraits made from images taken from popular social networks and physically printed on canvas. The selected photos are classic half-length or full-figured portraits, →
CD – Line
The ambivalence of the title “For/Not For John Cage” and the reference to the master (whose birthday saw its hundredth anniversary last year) is suggestive of a versatile, multi-sided →
DVD – Illegal Art
Vicky Bennett (People Like Us) has become well known for her audio/visual collages that draw from old movie archives. The Keystone Cut Ups is →
CD – Ninja Tune
Thanks to the ability and versatility of Kid Koala, it is possible that an album in an oblique blues style with abstract hip-hop contaminations may also assume more →
Bacteria, beings measuring just a thousandth of a millimetre across, are the most widespread organisms on Earth. They are everywhere and can survive in extreme conditions. They mutate, adapt and seem able to communicate to collectively →
CD – Senufo Editions
From the San Francisco Bay Area in California comes Dakim Saadiq, also known under the moniker Dak as an abstract hip-hop producer and lo-fi experimenter. In 34 Fragments, varying →
Rer Megacorp [2CD + book], ISBN: 9780956018410, 80 pages, 2012, English
Peter Cusack has traveled to what he defines as “dangerous places”, including sites that have suffered environmental devastation (think Chernobyl) and locations at the →
2CD + booklet – Sub Rosa
The re-release of a John Cage work always gives a reviewer the opportunity to underline the importance of this figure in the evolution of the contemporary →
The cognitive neuroscientist Michael A. Persinger formulated a hypothesis that the link between human beings and the earth is so strong that a new geomagnetic field around the Earth could directly influence human conscience. On the →
