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.
What if you were locked in an art museum overnight with a rocket launcher, during a Jeff Koons retrospective? What would you do? You would have two options: to either stroll →
MEIAC, ISBN: 978- 8461343942
Supported by the work of the curator Nilo Casares, this book is unique. Not only because it’s printed in a limited edition number of copies, but →
CD – Record Label Records
Abstract sound design and experimental atmospheres meet a fusion style, mixing electro-acoustic beats and creating an artificial and frantic post-IDM pastiche. Record Label Records, a record label founded →
Deciding which lottery numbers to play is always a difficult choice. Generally the categories of thought are two: one is trusting in coincidence (when for example people obtain numbers from dreams or the →
CD – Flatmate
Under the Spanish Flatmate Music imprint, three years after their last release, Retina.it (Lino Monaco and Nicola Buono) are back. This veteran duo in Italian electronic experimentation formed in →
Sternberg Press, 2010, English, ISBN 978-1-933128-70-2, 176 pages
A trajectory of almost thirty years is taken as a sort of hypertext path by Jean-Yves Leloup in his parceled examination of electronic music →
CD – Mutable
He’s back to delight lovers of more “purist” experimentation. Al Margolis – aka If, Bwana – is an acrobatic audio-artist, active since the eighties, who remains effective and calibrated in →
Net.Art already belongs to media archaeology as Oslo 2003 “Written in Stone” exhibition clearly stated. Exhibiting net art has always been all about commitment, because it is simply not possible to avoid interpretation if →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Vitriolic sequences, without any sense of sadness even though peppered with church-like and orchestral moments. Accelerations, pauses and slowdowns, sudden changes of tempo, and an insane attitude for unusual →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415996969, 248 pages, February 9, 2010, English
How technologies are shaping and affecting our body has been often discussed in terms of “representation” and identity. Eve Shapiro is a sociologist researching →
Mp3 – Trust Lost
Flawlessly integrated in this project – the result of five years of collaboration – are the broken electro-acoustic frequencies of Francisco Meirino and the drones and highly sensitive, →
6xdvd, Laboratorio Arte Alameda
Celebrating ten years of activity, LAA (Laboratorio Arte Alameda), a prominent art, media and technology institution based →
CD – Ad Noiseam
When we choose to review an Ad Noiseam release – a Berlin-based experimental label founded in 2001 by Nicolas Chevreux – we know from the start that we will →
In contemporary art installations the television is a commonplace item, sometimes used more for its “scenic” value than for its symbolic potential. In ‘Luminant Point Arrays’ Stephan Tillmans chooses analogue TV →
