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.
2CD – Col Legno
Quadrat:sch are a chamber music ensemble that includes Barbara Romen, Christof Dienz, Gunter Schneider, Alexandra Dienz, Zeena Parkins, Herbert Pirker and Kassian Erhart. The band plays many instruments; some →
Whitechapel Gallery, ISBN-13: 9780854881871, 240 pages, 2011, English
There seems to be a kind of sub-genre in sound art books: the anthology of historical texts. Perhaps because sound art is →
12″ – Dekorder
This luxurious edition has sprung from the elaborations of the Toad Blinker combo (musician Dan Haurhurst and animator-illustrator Rueben Sutherlan). The release is a 12” vinyl with “zoetropic” images in a pure →
The Composites opens up a new space between language and software, harnessing some of the masterpieces of literary fiction (in terms of character names and descriptions of physical appearance – mug-shots basically) and →
Pantheon, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-0375423727, Hardcover: 544 pages
This is an excellent history of information theory and science. The quantification and qualification of information is a process here investigated through key →
CD – Line
Inspired by the work of James Tenney, Gyögy Ligeti, Charlemagne Palestine, and Conlon Nancarrow, these eight studies for piano by Seth Horvitz use some simple computer-assisted composition processes. The →
While various Occupy movements around the world are conducting events on the streets in front of financial and political institutions, in the Czech Republic preferred sites for activism have come to include →
CD – Cronica Electronica
This very enjoyable and original release has been produced by Heitor Alvelos, Anselmo Canha eand Marc Behrens and mastered by the latter and Miguel Carvalhais, →
There is no doubt that every inch of public space is becoming increasingly scrutinized by microscopes intent on examining the maximum potential for attention and revenue. In the throes of an amorphous supply-demand model, →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262015424, 256 pages, 2011, English
Programmability as ideology. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is originally discussing how the unavoidability of networked computation in our society has permeated →
CD – Ghost Box
Under the moniker Belbury Poly hides the experimenter and musician Jim Jupp, head honcho of Ghost Box Music, a label he co-founded. There is a definite British sensibility →
Perhaps most of us have become desensitized or voluntarily tune out to instances of hyperreality. Yet, there are others who seek to engage with hyperreality in hopes of better understanding our physical reality. →
CD – Mazagran
This is a composition for four organs by Tom Johnson that modulates for 50 minutes on a single note – the tonal key “C” – played in various octaves. →
Crónica, dvd, Crónica 063, 2011
Field recording exploded as a practice in experimental music during the 2000s. It has been used in the most varied ways, transcending its basic →
