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.
3CD wooden Box – Record Label Records / Cataclyst
“Ambient” has been released in a specially made wooden box containing three CDs and 35 art cards with original photos, drawings, collage and paintings by Abby and Robbie Martin. The →
CD – Nur/Nicht/Nur
This piano solo music project was realized by Florian Wittenburg between 2000 and 2009. “Patterns in a Chromatic Field” is a clear and respectful homage to Morton Feldman (a North American experimenter appreciated for his instrumental compositions), →
What sound do we hear when the machines “talk” to each other? We are partly excluded from this conversation because the human body is not designed to “hear” machine language. Through the work “Speak / Fala” Rejane Cantoni and Leonardo →
USB Stick + Card Game – Shackle
Anne La Berge is a talented flautist and free-form experimenter, Robert van Heumen a skilled laptop producer and performer (we remember him for his releases on Creative Sources and Evil Rabbit). Together they →
Sextant Et Plus, Gantner Multimedia Centre, France, book+CD, ISBN: 9782953965032, 176 pages, 2013, English, French
eRikm is a French sound artist who connects sound and visual arts in a natural way, and effectively expresses in his works the relationship “between the →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Igorrr returns on Ad Noiseam, enhancing his usual practices with a strong mix of breakcore and classical music. In this case classical music is represented by baroque harmonies, with the addition of a touch of →
“Would you like to pose for me?” With this invitation the FATlab artists Addie Wagenknecht & Pablo Garcia have co-opted adult webcam performers to pose for them. Rather than extreme erotic performances, this time they were hired by chat (in →
CD – Line
Antye Greie-Ripatti, aka AGF, has made her debut on Richard Chartier’s label, the LINE [SEGMENTS]. With Source Voice she seems to pick up again the thread of the long introspective experimentation: she modulates vocal emissions as her →
Box Set / CD – 12K
Very delicate envelopes, persuasive textures and circular, repetitive tunes: the quietist textures of the recordings by Taylor Deupree reverberate impalpably, elusively, beatifically – thanks to dreamy drones, carefully produced environmental patterns, electroacoustic resonances and →
CD + DL – FARMACIA901
Ubik is the moniker chosen by the Roman musician Marco Bonini, a guitarist and experimenter originally emanating out of the jazz tradition. Between March and August 2011, using only his instrument and a personal computer, →
Princeton University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0691155814, 278 pages, 2012, English, USA
Dismantling the almost religious belief that technology-driven security can save our lives, this book openly goes against all the dogmas coined after 9-11 and the consequent politics of fear. The →
What is needed to properly narrate a city? For a writer the highest ambition in this respect should be to quote and reproduce the truest “voice” of the city itself. Daniel J Wilson’s project began with the process of getting →
Among the media used for artistic purposes, the vinyl record has played a special role. It has been around for more than a century and has outlasted many others. It is one of the very few media that can function →
G.L.O.R.I.A, ISBN-13: 978-8691091118, 216 pages, 2013, English
Some current strategies for urban control have been introduction and conducted without fanfare, implementing or modifying infrastructures in the city in a way that they can prevent crime or disturbances. Such strategies are →
