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.
These chant-boxes are electronic devices sometimes provided to help believers pray in Buddhist temples in China. The gadgets, similar to pocket radios and sometimes packaged with images of Buddha, broadcast loops of prayer, →
CD – Kvitnu
Extracting the CD from the very elegant “special cardboard double sleeve”, an hexagonal box with polished embroidery and playing the record soon leads to the realization that the content is equally as precious as the design. Kateryna →
CD + Book, Mego eMEGO 118, Urbanomic UF13, 2010
It’s less and less common to find music labels brave enough to release and actually invest in concepts and experimentation, giving them proper →
Faith Condition is the graduation project in Industrial Design by Lukas Franciszkiewicz, a designer who has focused his creative practice on some important questions concerning our media society. In particular Franciszkiewicz focused his →
CD – Contour Editions
Harsh frequencies, superimposed in layers, obtained thanks to the feedback of a Walkman and emissions produced using short and medium-wave radios. These are some of the techniques employed by Alfredo →
CD – Ohm Resistence
The grooves of “Harvester” offer a very shady, almost maniacal sound, characterized by slow cadences and post-rock influences. Gator Bait Ten, comprising M. Gregor Filip, Simon J. Smerdon, Kurt Submerged →
Springer
, ISBN-13: 978-3709100950
256 pages, 2010, English
Participatory strategies involving the collective manipulation of digital content were hampered in the past due to worries about intellectual property rights, but they are →
Molleindustria’
s games have traditionally aimed to put the player in a rather uncomfortable or unusual position. Previous games have asked users to run McDonald’s businesses, to hide church scandals in Italy, or to →
CD – Psychonavigation
Psychonavigation is an Irish label based in Dublin, stylistically focused between ambient, electronica and electro. Head honcho Keith Down is also – in this case – the curator of “Mindfield”, an →
Artists have always been fascinated by imperfection. A little failure, a small mistake, an unexpected behaviour can be perceived as more meaningful and intriguing than the perfect artwork. This is even more relevant →
CD – Winds Measure
Organized as a transversal field recording orchestra, the combo of Scott Smallwood, Sawako, Seth Cluett, Ben Owen and Civyiu Kkliu structured this project, providing a draft of unprocessed recordings strictly localized in fractions of 10 minutes →
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899553314, 240 pages, 2011, English
The fields of interactive (or “computational”) design and digital art have been progressively juxtaposed since the two fields began to use the →
CD – Artek Sounds
Here we find a vocal stuttering, a sort of gibberish where a series of hardly decipherable words are emitted, winning us over. We are talking about “Sermon On Wings And →
CD – Mutable
Mutable Music The first scores of “Another Time and Place” offer flowing, tranquil piano variations, rhythmic chords, a host of melodies and some slightly jazzy influences. The structures in “Solos And Sequences I”, a composition that dates back →
