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 – Die Schachtel
Analog synthesizers, a Farfisa organ, turntables, a tape recorder, a CRT TV: all devices that have no reason to exist without electricity. The relationship between the instruments and →
CD – Komplott
Hanna Hartman is a Swedish sound artist and composer who lives and works in Berlin. She focuses on evolving the characteristics of sounds, revealing correspondences that are not →
“Sea and Spar between“, a work by Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland, is a generator of poetic lines formed by melding words and expressions from “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville and →
Aksioma – Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana and Koroška Gallery of Fine Arts, ISBN 978-9619219218, Ljubljana, 2010, English, Slovenian
One of the artistic projects that has been successfully able to challenge the bureaucratic →
CD – Herbal International
From the title, “Beautiful Ghost Wave”, we already expect ethereal and intangible sounds, an impression immediately confirmed in this work by Jason Kahn. The record employs a →
Disc.o is a plastic representation of the unit length of repetitive contemporary music: the Loop. The author, Andreas Haider (aka muk), is explicitly referencing the SuperPiano of Emerick Spielmann, invented in 1929 as the →
CD – Karaoke Kalk
Digital-acoustic mixes, delicate lullabies and ambient scores. Overlapping textures sometimes develop from a single note, among meandering drones and clear harmonic articulations. All of Emanuele Errante’s electro-acoustic wisdom →
Neural #39 extra (only for subscribers):
‘By this time next year…’, 14 pages catalogue.
Catalogue of the boredomresearch’s solo exhibition
‘By this time next year…‘
Georges House Gallery, Folkestone
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Cantaloupe Music, microchip in cd case, Ca21042, 2009-2010
Coming a few years after the first Perich’s 1-Bit Music “circuit album”, this 1-Bit Symphony never ceases to amaze. The first problem is: how to →
The genesis of “Simulen“, a work by Congolese artist Jean Katambayi Mukendi exhibited at Pixelache 2011 festival in Helsinki, is very delicate. From the functional point of view it is a prototype for →
Pluto Press, ISBN: 978-0745327006, 2011, English, 224 pages
After all the myths about the magical use of digital networks for political reasons, including the north African uprisings, and the consequent hype, it’s →
CD – Aagoo
Inserted in our player, this CD immediately plays anxious sounds – dreamy and visionary – reminiscent of the original soundtrack of the movie →
In the darkness our sense of place, space and time diminish and we are as lost as we are free to navigate. We are like particles adrift and while we may not require darkness →
ISBN: 978-3868951387, Kontejner/Revolver, Croatia, 2010, 242 pages
If you don’t know Kontejner you’ve missed something important. This curatorial collective based in Zagreb has already a decade of history (celebrated in this book), →
