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.
Yuri Suzuki’s designs for unconventional players provide combinations of objects that re-mix not only the content of records but the reproduction media as well. One of his latest pieces presents us with a mix between →
CD – Aagoo
The imaginative ambient sounds in this record were captured in four different rooms by Friulan sound-artist Cristiano Deison, a very ethereal manipulator not new to the international scenes, thanks to →
CD – Heavy Listening
Wow is faithful to the implicit statement of intent in its title. The vinyl confines itself to ultralow frequencies at the limits of human perception and is supposed →
CD – Gruenrekorder
Between 2010 and 2011 Rupert Cox and Angus Carlyle captured a broad collection of audio recordings that focus on the planting and harvesting of specific →
Luke Evans and Josh Lake have created intriguing process-based photographs by turning their bodies into “cameras.” Both ingested 35mm photographic film slides and allowed their natural bodily functions to do the rest of the work as the film travelled through →
Polity, ISBN: 9780745662534, 200 pages, 2012, English
Galloway defines interfaces as “action-oriented processes.” They have “effects” (thus the title), “as they transform material states and are themselves effects of other things.” →
The number of times we find ourselves in a public place looking for an open or accessible wireless network shows to what extent we have to negotiate our digital presence and relationship with →
edited by Sarah Cook, Sara Diamond – Riverside Architectural Press / ABC Art Books Canada [book + DVD-ROM], ISBN: 9781894773225, 1100 pages, 2012, English
This →
Barbara Lattanzi’s research engages with writing software that manipulates the sequence of time in movies, with aesthetically and structurally destabilizing results. Her Optical De-dramatization Engine (O.D.E. ) is a program “modulating” frames →
Springer Vienna Architecture, ISBN: 9783709112625, 230 pages, 2012, English
The act of remixing, enabled by the technical possibility of sampling, innate in the structural definition of digital technologies, has a seminal contemporary →
“Obama texting Past convicted Catch receive Egypt’s dog”. Here is an example of a poem signed by Plinko Poetry , an interactive poetry generator designed by Deqing Sun and Inessah Selditz. The single →
Duke University, ISBN: 9780822351351, 224 pages, 2011, English
Despite a decade of proliferation in pervasive control systems, the analysis of the effectiveness of these systems and the criticism of the lack →
CD – Illegal-Art
Inspired by a seminal text written in the late sixties by Bruno Munari and Davide Mosconi, the turntablist and cut-up artist Filippo Paolini – based in →
Pixelhead is a simple balaclava made with an elastic fabric very similar to swimsuit material. Its aesthetic appearance, however, is quite specific: the decorative pattern chosen by Martin Backes is indeed “pixelated” and the →
