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 – Satelita / A-Musik
You can listen to Lucia Mense at the Berghain in Berlin, together with Sören Leupold, in a live performance released by Lux Aeterna – and then be →
CD – Touch
Two distinct compositions complete this release by Chris Watson & Marcus Davidson for the renowned label Touch. The first track (composed by Chris Watson only) “Midnight at the Oasis” stands out for its focus on exploring →
Is baring a hard disk by making its content public still considered an act of provocation? In 2000, starting with the sarcastic idea that “privacy is stupid”, the 0100101110101101.ORG group launched the →
448 pages , University Of Chicago Press , 2011, English , ISBN: 978-0226038315
The communication problem between humanism and science (defined in the past as the “two cultures” problem) is not a recent one: →
CD – Dragon’s Eye
Minimal digital sequences, crackling and very refined, fill the listening space. Lightly throbbing sound developments are central to this project by Lucia H. Chung and Martin →
A common issue in presenting experimental music and sound art is finding an effective way to share with the audience the fun of exploring unconventional uses of musical objects. Reinventing, hacking and sometimes →
RE/Search Publications, ISBN-13: 978-3902796028, 240 pages, English
This is the third anthology after “Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?” and “Pr0nnovation?: Pornography and Technological Innovation” to expand on and “archive” →
We generally think of surveillance as a detached gaze, a remote form of watching. The fact that cameras record information continuously and unobtrusively somehow makes their presence elusive. And the idea of data being →
CD – Thorsten Knaub
Thorsten Knaub – Listening Station
It’s not the first time – of course – and it won’t be the last here at Neural that in an experimental music, →
Edições Nodar, Nodar 003
This thick book, coming with two CDs, is the outcome of a three-year program of international sound art residencies made by twin brothers →
CD – Die Schachtel
It’s not irrelevant that “Death By Water” was recorded on the small island of Giudecca in Venice, even if the distilled threads shine very abstractly and synthetically – →
CD – Room40
Attivo dalla seconda metà degli anni novanta, Ralph Steinbrüchel, sperimentatore svizzero che già abbiamo avuto modo d’apprezzare su Domizil, 12k, and/OAR, Line e Non Visual Objects, torna a pubblicare su Room40, etichetta sotto le cui insegne avevano →
CD – Evil Rabbit
Eclettico musicista contemporaneo, flautista e compositore, professore al Conservatorio di Utrecht, jazzista e improvvisatore, Mark Alban Lotz certo non si fa mancare le occasioni per organizzare session le più estemporanee possibili. La sua carriera è costellata →
3″ Mini-CDR – Electroton
Edizione limitata (di sole 150 copie) e in mini-cdr 3 pollici per il sound-artista Higuchi Eitaro, sperimentatore di base a Kyoto che sotto il moniker di Dagshenma sforna la sua prima release per Electroton, etichetta guidata →
