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.
Associating music and color as a concept can be traced back to the 16th century painter Arcimboldo, even if the most quoted modern example is the “Sarabet”, a sort of “color organ” invented →
Greyscale Press, ISBN 978-2-9700706-0-3, August 2010, Format: Paperback, 4.25″ x 6.875″, 122 pages
In her introduction, Ana Carvalho describes the production process of this book as a “wiki-sprint.” It is, in fact, the →
CD – Zeitkratze
Recorded live at the Philharmonie Luxembourg in October 2009 and edited in the summer of the following year in Germany (GreenHouseStudios), these five new compositions by Alvin Lucier resonate →
Automatype- writer is a typewriter that works on its own: the buttons operate automatically, writing on the sheet without the need to type. The machine is also capable to detect human text and →
CD – Endgame
Gail Priest – Presentiments From The Spider Garden
Articulating field recordings in a fairly evocative way, with dilated drones and vocal interventions, using both digital techniques and acoustic instruments, →
Dala – Vinyl player concept for fantastic sound | Roundedoff
Dala – Vinyl player concept for fantastic sound
(tags: vinyl sound music)
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3899553086, 312 pages, August 1, 2010, English
Carsten Nicolai has multiple attitudes towards sound, art, science and graphic design, but they are almost perfectly consistent with each →
“Net label” is the established definition of record labels that produce only mp3 files and usually give them away (or sometimes even sell them) online. Delaware, an atypical Japanese music/design group, →
CD – Serein
This is the debut album by the Alex and Svitlana Samoylenko Smalley duo, aka Olan Mill – two rather cultured and refined audioartists who propose elegiac instrumental sequences with →
Baltan Laboratories, ISBN 9789081583015, English, 2010
After the establishment of the MIT Media Lab in 1985 the concept of a “Lab”, meant as a space for research and experimentation with →
CD – Gruen
No metaphor – even in the art world, with its more experimental and avant-garde latitudes – exceeds the immediate fascination that the hot-cold dualism manages to evoke. The extremes →
How can a simple, autonomous object with a universal form become “emotional”? Our ancestral feelings are triggered by very simple mechanisms that came about through a need to improve preservation and reproduction in a →
CD – Ad Noiseam
New implementations by David Thrussell, who once again renews his personal approach to production, on the one hand remain faithful to the artist’s reputation, while also proving him →
Errant Bodies Press: Surface Tension Supplement No. 4, ISBN: 978-0-9772594-8-9, 104 page + CD
As sound art is a mostly conceptual process, it can be easily set in the autonomous →
