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 – Flux
We remember Frank Rothkamm for his “multiform inspiration and lack of prejudices and genre barriers”, for a kind of hybrid music able to combine “classic tradition and rock culture, interweaving computer music strains, cut-upping and free form →
Photo/Nikto is a game for the iPad, designed by Annelore Schneider and Douglas Edric Stanley for the project “Unterplay” of the Master of the Media Design – HEAD Geneve. Its functioning is very →
CD – Glacial Movements
The Netherworld project, supported by the Roman producer Alessandro Tedeschi (founder of the label Glacial Movements), has traditionally been characterized by ambient sounds both isolationist and ethereal. Now the road →
Continuum, ISBN-13: 978-1441161369, 304 pages, 2010, English
This is a book about “auditory life,” exploring the everyday practice of listening and how auditory studies can better interpret and influence society. Systematically divided →
Phone Storyis a new game by Molleindustria for Android and iPhone (available for Android but already banned by Apple and deleted from the Appstore, because it was charged with violent content and non-compliance →
CD – Bruit Clair
The debut album of Emmanuelle Gibello, a Parisian artist accustomed to the union of visual and electronica, reveals a skillful manipulator of field recordings that have been extrapolated from both natural →
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899553369, 240 pages, 2011, English
If you’re stuck with the concept of zines as a product of punk, you’d better check this book and learn how “self-publishing” in →
CD – Escrec
Dutchman Bram Van Den Oever, better known as Gluid, has already published a first solo cdr-album on esc.rec. For his second release he collaborated with Paul De Jong and →
A set of relatively simple rules can often depict the complex patterns found in many natural phenomena. Among these, the relationships between individuals of a living society, like the one of a →
CD – 12K
Here is some really sweet and delicate instrumental music by Illuha, the moniker that hides Corey Fuller and Data Tomoyashi, two musicians who articulate gentle and winding sequences, operating mainly →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415893107, 176 pages, 2011, English
Beyond being a co-organizer of four editions of the mythical read.me software art festivals (each of which was documented in a reader she co-edited) Olga Goriunova →
CD – Cave12
Antoine Chessex is a talented Swiss composer, sax player and experimental musician, also familiar with sound installations and trans-disciplinarian collaborations. For “Dust for 3 Violins, Backtape and Electronics”, as →
Finally you can also subscribe to a purely digital version of the printed Neural magazine!
It’s of course cheaper, includes digital access to issues since #29, which are indeed searchable, all the web addresses are clickable, →
Neural #41 extra, Eavesdropping – The Indiscretions of The Ear, catalogue of the exhibition, (only for subscribers):
artists: Acid Police | Anne Wellmer | BMB con. Jeroen Uyttendaele | Lars Kynde | Michele Spanghero Wen Chin Fu
curated →
