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 – Kafkagarden
In “Music Library 1” Marcus Fjellström takes inspiration from classic music libraries – collections of sounds that were used in sixties and seventies movies and low cost television productions. →
In the urban landscape it can be hard to distinguish a sign from a trace and sometimes even from a piece of garbage. The global popularity of shoe tossing, the practice of throwing →
CD – Dekorder
Recorded in Oslo between 2006 and 2010, then mixed in Berlin, “Shadow Of Events” is the third solo album by Alexander Rishaug, a sound-artist prone to the use →
What happens if we scan a physical object and then restore it to its initial state using 3D technology? In his work Glitch Reality II the British designer Matthew Plummer-Fernandez has experienced →
CD – Ohm Resistance,
Merzbow, AKA Masami Akita, needs no introduction. This pioneer of “noise” is well-known in the international experimental scenes for his sophisticated yet raw, “free jazz” attitude. Balázs Pándi is also quite →
CD – Mutable
Stemming from the homonymous biennial festival in the Czech Republic, Ostravská Banda – with its twenty musicians – thrives under the direction of Peter Kotik, a veteran of unconventional →
CD – Pogus
The second release for the label Pogue by the Greek-born South African composer Dimitri Voudouris, an artist whose output is never predictable, focuses on the psycho-acoustic nature of auditory phenomena and on →
When R. Murray Shafer conducted the International Sound Preference Survey a few decades ago, traffic noise was categorized as one of the least appreciated sounds in the world, together with dentist drills and →
CD – Pingipung
Sven Kacirek, a young musician who graduated in percussion and marimba at the conservatory of Hamburg, is an author inspired by the many facets of African music. In →
ROOM 40, Book + 3″ CD, Dec 2010, RMBK001, ISBN-13: 978-0980814903
Collaborative sound mapping, random field recording, sonic memory and live transmission from specific sites are various approaches that have been explored and used in →
Check the Electrohype 2010 photo set here.
After a fascinating snowstorm, the sixth edition of Electrohype, the biennial for electronic art, opened at the Ystad Art Museum in Ystad (Sweden). A point of →
The ‘ Quantum Parallelograph ‘, designed by Patrick Stevenson-Keating, is a bizarre medical-looking white device made to translate our invisible inner workings into various languages interpreted by industry experts. The information produced →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, English, 320 pages, 2010, ISBN: 978-0816667406
For networked societies, emergent intelligence and swarms have taken on important explanatory power in terms of highly distributed modes of →
Kyle McDonald is well-known for exploring the boundaries of public and private space in our post-privacy world. With his Keytweeter he placed himself under digital surveillance for an entire year, →
