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.
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 →
CD – Room40
In the notes of the album eRikm says: “The time spent on the composition of some of these pieces gave me the possibility to break out, that is to get →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978 0262017855, 248 pages, 2012, English
The term “multimedia” has sounded obsolete for more than a decade now. This book by Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey brings its →
2CD – Rumpsti Pumsti
Expériences Musicales leaves a strong impression on the listener and is part of a small number of recordings that have “anticipated” the history of contemporary music. Jean Dubuffet, →
Stephen Cornford dedicates his experimental artistic work to the production of sounds through the employment of various manipulated objects and techniques. In his recent installation known as Five Introverted Machines, five identical first-generation Philips →
CD – cave12
This album utilizes 85 sessions of hybrid “audio paint” system HighC/UPIC and field recordings of fallen snow, breaking bones, magnetic filed and insects. The system is a structural model →
ArtScience Interfaculty Press – [book] ISBN: 978-94-6190-819-3, 300 pages, 2012, English
The study of cross-modal perception or synesthesia is a subject of research that has found a renewed interest also due →
CD – 23five
This interpretation of Helmut Schäfer’s free score features muted tones from a pipe organ, electronics, a hair dryer, a gong, a violin and an intermittent flux of percussion. →
