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 – Hellosquare/Z6
Sotto il moniker di Candlesnuffer c’è David Brown, musicista melburegno experimental – con un passato nell’art rock/punk scene di metà anni settanta – in sintonia adesso con evoluzioni improvvisative, in bilico fra free jazz e altre non →
The project of Richard Vijgen Deleted City is an interactive data visualization of the myriad of data hosted on the free web hosting Geocities, that was very popular at the dawn of the →
The MIT Press
, English,
464 pp.,
ISBN 978-0262014960
This book is a small gem among the many dealing with the history of media art. Stephen Jones has undertaken an excellent and extensive →
CD – Fang Bomb
A hoarse voice stands out. This is the beginning of “Scotona Song”, conceived as something like an opening sketch that features walkie-talkie humming and a droning organ – →
Versus is a kinetic sound installation by David Letellier. Its functioning is characterized by an interactive dialogic mechanism. There are two kinetic sculptures that are interdependent and they have to be face to →
DVD – Winds Measure
Randomly found old Kodachrome slides and an uncomplicated digital set-up (laptops, midi controllers, a video projector, two diaprojectors, dimmer, lights and induction/contact microphones) are the basis of “Lacunae”, an →
Polity Press, 200 pages, 2011, English, ISBN-13: 978-0745641843
Defining new media has always been tricky. Here, the author gives a clear and thorough definition of new media based on three components: the device/artifact →
With the work “On Spam, Business Proposal” Niels Post documents the urban intervention he acted in Brussels with a photographs series . For this action the artist has selected some of the →
CD Anty-Copyright
Let’s be honest, when faced with a new Anty-Copyright crew release we are always prepared to encounter something unusual, radical and extremist, even from the perspective of audio art and →
CD – Domizil
S basic elements of each auditory event: the oscillations. The feedback and non-linear filters, frequency distortion, granular synthesis work, crackle and various kinds of noise, combine to generate a →
216 pages, Oxford University Press, 2010, English, ISBN-13: 978-0195387667
The stated purpose of Demers in this book is to find a unifying (strictly speaking) aesthetics for electronic music, despite the very different →
Ongoing diminution of natural resources and the urgent need to adopt more sustainabile practices are undoubtedly among the most crucial matters for the world today. As awareness increases, more and more young creators →
CD – Ahornfelder
The sound is deep and suggestive in “Città Utopica”. This project by Burkhard Friedrich was created in the guise of an environmental installation enriched by visual elements and traversed by intense drones, →
ISBN: 978-3899553420, 288 pages, 2011, English, Gestalten
“Activism” in art has become a fashionable topic, especially after the beginning of the global financial crisis. Critiquing the system, formalizing regrets about the →
