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 – Public Information
Appearing on CD and vinyl (500 copies) and adorned with a small but interesting booklet of rare vintage photos, “Electronic Without Tears” takes us back to the epic →
The grid swallows us. Increasingly it defines and shapes our positions. Italian artist Paolo Cirio uses this uncomfortable fact as the basis for a new work. Street Ghosts reveals a sense of the →
CD – Fang Bomb
Claustrophobic settings, dark patterns in the background, disguised melodies, rather diluted and sidereal threads. In this manner begins “The Black Sun Transmissions” by Dag Rosenqvist, aka Jasper TX, →
The debate over the value of intellectual property has been conducted along more or less similar lines since digital file sharing came to the fore in the late 90s. While the industry attempts to equate →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816677955, 504 pages, 2012, English
Does the fact that even Google started to pay (widely announced) grants to digital humanities →
Mute Books, ISBN: 9781906496517, 184 pages, 2011, English
This is a conceptual, readable book with a well-developed and unique theme. Agit Disco, in fact, is a “collection of annotated playlists made by →
Plöttner Verlag Gmbh, ISBN: 9783862110483, 2011, 256 pages, English
Although self-proclaimed states are not a new concept, not even in →
The MIT Press,
ISBN: 978-0262042482
, 304 pages, 2011, English
One of the first broad discussions engaged in software art circles in the early 2000s concerned the pervasiveness of software in everyday life, →
Shitkatapult,
CD+DVD
, Strike134, 2011
It took a decade to Markus Popp/Oval to return and release another album (“O”) which radically changed its approach towards more classical sounds (with drums, guitar and →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262017459, 272 pages, 2012, English
Howard Rheingold has already proved himself a one-of-a-kind writer when it comes to technology and society. →
Revolver Berlin, ISBN: 978-3868951950 256 pages, German, English, 2012
Thinking for a minute of all the books celebrating the histories of different singular institutions put together, we can then imagine →
Sub Rosa, Book+DVD, ISBN: 978095 5736117, SR314, 2011
Treating sound as memory and involving a number of different professionals can achieve the most interesting results. “Sounds From Beneath” is the result of →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 9780816674657, 232 pages, English, 2011
In “Improper Life” Campbell develops his thought-provoking philosophical writing around the contrast →
CD – Aural Terrains
In the form of a reflection on emotional, psychological and physiological involvements with the words “home” and “territory”, the sounds that underlie this project include words, narrated stories, →
