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.
The MIT Press, 2010, 256 pp., ISBN-13: 978-0-262-01464-9
After years talking about the revolution in space perception induced by the real time IT networks, the strong industrial trend to go wireless →
CD – Gruenrekorder
The “Playing With Words” festival stems from a collaboration between “Kulturnetz Frankfurt e.V.” and “CRiSAP”(Creative Research into Sound Art Practice). The first is a nonprofit organization promoting cultural events and →
The combination of old and new media can create surprising results. ‘Palmtop Theater’, invented by artists Jitsiru Mase and Tom Nagae is a good example of this. By translating a nineteenth century magic →
CD – Baskaru
Lugano Fell is a solo project by James Taylor, a founding member of the tech house duo Swayzak, a combo that for more than a decade has been active →
The MIT Press, August 2010, ISBN: 978-0262013901, A Leonardo Book, 440 pp., 20 illus.
Born in the context of the rich Australian audio and sound studies (as all the three editors are), this →
CD -Audiobulb
David Newman, head honcho of Audiobulb, is back as Autistici, this time remixed by a large group of colleagues, all well-known producers in the contemporary experimental electronic scene. From the first →
The mashup master Mark Gunderson, aka The Evolution Control Committee, has been in the music plagiarism field for the last couple of decades. One of his latest tactical products (after so many others) →
CD – Gruen
of city traffic. Glimpses of a background with exotic music and citations that emerge alienated from their original context reassemble during atonal passages into extended audio emergencies that →
The MIT Press, 480 pages, English, ISBN-13: 978-0262195881
There are few books that can be described as “essential” in a specific field. This is one of them. Salter extensively explores performances intertwined →
CD – Zeromoon
Envelopes “stretched” beyond all limits, circular sounds fascinatingly unfolded among cracks, feedbacks, loops and rhythmic digital beats. Myo, the moniker of Cory O’Brien, is not new to using multiple free →
In algorithmic composition one frequent problem that programmers are faced with is how to make computers less predictable. The clue to the matter is that there are infinitely more variables in →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2010, Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-0816666690
Hypertext represents a cornerstone in experimental literature. From the first experiments until the late adopters, it has evolved from a technique to →
In a crowded restaurant a small plastic box attached to a power outlet goes unnoticed. It could be a transformer or a charger. The box conceals, in fact, a small computer capable of mapping →
sQuare, DVD, 2008
This is a documentary film made with passion about passionate musicians. Amy Grill, director, and her husband David Day, a techno enthusiast working at a Cambridge (U.S.)-based music distributor decided →
