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.
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 →
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 →
