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.
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 →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262018364, 168 pages, 2012, English, USA
One of the main open questions about code is its similarity to spoken language. The latter connects to code in many respects: as an essential “interface” with the machine, but →
CD – Herbal International
Although the colorful and gestalt artwork by Rebecca Norton immediately draws attention, our first impression of the sounds emanating from this record is that they are comparatively irritating, distorted and lacking formal definition. The music →
“Machine art” is one of those definitions that tries to label more complex concepts in a way that makes them more understandable. But “machine” is hard to precisely define and there are a lot of mechanisms (physical and virtual) that →
Nouvelles Editions SCALA, Centre des Arts Enghien les Bains, book+dvd, ISBN-13: 978-2359880465, 196 pages, 2011, French, France
This monograph celebrates thirty years of activity of one of the most well known French media artists. It was produced in conjunction with →
CD – Gruenrekorder
With Terra Subfónica Daniel Blinkhorn has created a conceptual radiophonic work that fuses familiar, odd, neglected and unheard sounds. The sound-artist has focused his attention on the potentiality of comprehension and impressions of the medium of radio, →
Zimoun is known for his multiform artworks and installations created from commonplace industrial objects that explore array aesthetics combined with rhythmic sound. His most recent work, 60 Medical Infusion Sets, Water, Fire, Metal Sheets, consists of a room containing medical →
CD – Aagoo
The Minutes is a refined and committed work by Isreal Martinez, a Mexican audio-artist enjoying increasing success in recent times. The ten tracks captivate the listener in a continuum of field recordings and fragmentary audio captures. These →
Actar, ISBN-13: 978-8415391029, 363 pages, 2013, English, UK
When a luxury architecture magazine dedicates some space to “software”, it’s usually expected to fill pages with a lot of 3D rendered structures and mobile-related experiments, missing many crucial questions about →
CD – Baskaru
Based on the homonymous story by Gustave Flaubert, Un Cœur Simple by Stephan Mathieu is characterized by quietist, dilated and dreamy evolutions. Mirroring Flauber’s textual aesthetic, these elements remain faithful to a dark and fervent narration, soaked →
Despite fashion often being considered superficial, limited to windows and glossy magazines, it must also be recognized that it has always been a forerunner and spokesman for certain cultural trends and evolutions of the generational history of human society. We →
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Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1441122131, 336 pages, 2013, English, UK
Given the prolific current production of theory about experimental music (especially its “noisy” edges), this book represents a brave and solitary effort in trying to weave together the threads of a highly →
