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.
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 →
CD – Hibernate
The recordings made for Presence were originally conceived by Yann Novak for a sound performance held at VOLUME, a curated event at the Torrance Art Museum in June 2010. The sound →
“Communicating Bacteria” is an installation inspired by biological research on the flow of communication between bacteria. It is the result of a collaboration between the artist Anna Domitriu, (for a long time engaged in research →
Paperback: 248 pages, The MIT Press; updated edition edition (March 11, 2011), English, ISBN-10: 0262515849, ISBN-13: 978-0262515849
This is a book about hacks and pranks at MIT, compiled →
CD – Agxivatein
A pair of headphones, a couple of active speakers, a DVD player, a digital frame with a USB memory stick – all set in a sound space activated each time for a single listener. “Apparatus” can be →
I-R.A.S.C. is a device that protects against infrared surveillance cameras. It is in fact composed of an elastic wearable band equipped with special LEDs that emit infrared rays that are invisible to the naked →
booklet+dvd, 44 pages, Canada, 2009, EAVM/Hexagram, ISBN: 978-2-922392-11-1
“Sonic Architecture” is an expression used to describe very different things, from the architectural audio-reflective properties of a building to the structure of a complex →
The work of Idan Hayosh disguises military imagery in simple arrangements of ordinary objects. Walking into his installations one is confronted with symmetrical displays of lamps, cutlery, gas tanks, scooters or fans, neatly spread →
CD – GH Records
Francisco Lopez and Novi_Sad certainly don’t need too much introduction in the contemporary enclaves of experimental electronica. In “Titans”, again, they prove their incommensurable talent, →
See the Elektra 12 photo set on Flickr
Montreal is the undisputed cultural capital of Canada and the largest city in the French-speaking province of Quebec. Although there’s a visible and perceivable strong legacy →
CD – Mego
From the tradition of the Fluxus movement – of which Yasunao Tone was formerly one of the important organizers – the Japanese maestro transcends continuous mutation of matter with →
Springer Vienna Architecture, 2010, English, book+dvd, 212 pages, ISBN: 978-3709103203
After decades when artists had to take a guest seat in scientific labs (when admitted), being regarded as accepted intruders, the development of art and science laboratories has become more →
CD – and/OAR
Luigi Turra presents three CDs in a single release for and/OAR, including an equal number of extended and distinct compositions – Enso, Ancient Silence and Shasekishu respectively. From the beginning the →
