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.
Immersive audiovisual environments are often associated with elaborate and cutting edge technologies. From Imax theaters to works such as Filmachine by Keiichiro Shibuya and Takashi Ikegami, impressive amounts of equipment are deployed to →
CD – Faitiche
Introspective, dreamy and dense sounds, intense but restrained, are intertwined in a very calibrated way in ‘Bird, Lake, Objects’. Using only one microphone to capture the →
Fan Club – Microdrama for Objects – SoundKino
Matteo Marangoni, Fan Club, Microdrama for Objects
(tags: art sound)
YouTube – The World's Biggest Drum Machine
Propellerhead's world's biggest drum machine
(tags: sound music urban performance)
CD – Cronica
Mathias Delplanque was born in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso, later moving to Nantes, France – the town where he currently lives and works. Composer, performer and music critic, Delplanque →
The Janus Machine on Vimeo
The Janus Machine by Kyle McDonald
(tags: art media visual)
CD-ROM Entr’acte E80
If the field of audiovisual production has two different poles (the sonified visual and the visualized sound) this work can be placed exactly in the middle. Colour Projections is software →
Tate Muybridgizer Gallery
The Muybridgizer is a free iPhone app available for download in the iTunes App Store. The Muybridgizer allows you to record an image sequence with your iPhone camera in the style of Eadweard Muybridge's iconic motion capture experiments
(tags: →
CD – Monochrome Vision
From Monochrome Vision, a label in Moscow dedicated to contemporary electronic sound experimentations, comes an interesting project signed by @C, the duo of Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais, an →
Linyl on Vimeo
Linyl are discs of light drawn from photos of past experiences that can be played on a special record player to create an ambience
(tags: sound vinyl visual)
Przemyslaw Moskal
Reflections: Painting With Pixels
(tags: art visual media net)
Errata on Vimeo
Errata (16mm, →
Virtueel Platform,
ISBN 978-94-90108-04-5
This is the printed outcome of the archive2020 conference held in Amsterdam in May 2009. It’s not a “proceedings” book (even if there’s a short report →
CD – Karaoke Kalk
Gentle, fragile chords played by Bill Wells and Stefan Schneider, a form of “chamber music” we might say, digs up an old-fashioned stylistic category. The →
‘Trail blazing’ has a kind of Wild West ring to it. Expanding on the relaxed, nerdy couch potato attitude that Marisa Olson has labeled ‘Pro Surfer’, Trail Blazers takes this idea →
CD – Mort Aux Vaches
In Ignatz, floating guitar sequences merge with an exotic, repetitive score, creating melancholic and sensitive environments. Simultaneously lo-fi and yet of an unusually high technical caliber, this work →
