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.
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 →
CD – Denovali
The British cellist and experimenter, now based in Berlin and working with Denovali label, is well known in neo-classicist contemporary circles for his elegiac scores and orchestral juxtapositions (we also remember him for his recent collaboration with →
Having analogue and digital working in perfect sync has always been a theoretical and practical challenge, as they typically rely on different physical interfaces. But Nicolas Bernier ’s “frequencies (a)” is a stellar exception. It’s made of tuning forks mechanically →
University of California Press, ISBN-13: 978-0520275003, 208 pages, 2012, English, USA
The “time capsule” concept is strictly related to an imagination that could be triggered in a future time when an event unfolds content to an unknown audience, generating surprise, →
If you missed it, Neural #44, Post Digital Print (postscript) is still available
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The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262018463, 328 pages, 2012, English, USA
The culture of code has been investigated in innovative publications, but this books aims to embed concepts related to code even in the process of being made, incarnating exemplary software →
The Livro-Obra app has been created by Itaú Cultural and the Associação Cultural o Mundo de Lygia Clark, recreating in a completely digital form the famous “Livro-Obra”, an iconic artist book created by Lygia Clark in 1983 that employed movable, →
ISBN-10: 394240589X, 240 Pages, 2012, English
The cover of this exhibition catalogue is printed on mirrored paper, reflecting those who look or try to take a picture of it (attempts of the latter can be observed on Google Images). It →
Runningonair – CDr & Data-DVD – 2012, English
Joe Evans creates music that begins with mathematics, looking into ratios in nature and translating them into sound structures. Sometimes his mathematical music experiments are conducted in parallel and the aural results →
edited by: Carsten Seiffarth, Carsten Stabenow, Golo Föllmer – PFAU Verlag, ISBN 978-3897274877, 416 pages, 2012, German, English
There was a long tradition of dismissing and repressing experimental music in Central and Eastern Europe during socialist times. And →
CD – 4Bit
Among the cuts of Somatic Soundtracks we find analogue synthesizers, loops, effects and guitars. The compositions were created in 2010 and 2012 →
edited by Dieter Daniels, Inke Arns, Spector Books, ISBN: 9783940064417, 296 pages, 2012, German, English
There have been countless celebrations of the centennial of John Cage’s birth around the world, involving different generations fascinated by one of the few truly →
CD – f4 Music
On first listening it is not easy to recognize the genealogy of this duo, whose origins are grounded in the rave and techno scenes of the nineties, in dj →
Baskaru, [CD+DVD], deluxe digipak, 9 audio tracks + 1 movie, 2012, English
Parallel 41 runs over both Naples and New York, the respective homes of the duo Julia Kent and Barbara De Dominicis. This work reflects an engaging project in →
