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 – Gruenrekorder
Despite the many negative impacts of the Covid-19 lockdowns, there were plenty of artistic and musical initiatives that drew conceptual inspiration from such an unusual and challenging time. One such project is Sounds of Absence by Peter →
The oculocentric concept of contemporary communications, which specialises in pleasing the eyes, can be profoundly challenged if we reverse the perspective and use the eyes as a site for the control of technological means. This concept seems deeply embedded in →
LP – Futura Resistenza
The influence of the historical avant-garde is clearly evident in the work of the current generation. Work like Could Change by Marc Matter reminds us of an absolute classic written more than 50 years ago, Alvin →
Crónica / i2ADS, ISBN 978-9899049130, Portuguese, English, 140 pages, 2022, Portugal
Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais (known as @c) are a prolific duo of musicians and sound artists. As founders of the groundbreaking →
Archaeology has taken on a new role in recent decades. From being a discipline that could trigger an imaginary journey into a frozen past, it now acts as a type of time machine, with the past becoming increasingly materialised in →
CD+Flexydisc – Pulver & Asch
Niton’s members are Luca Martegani (analogue synths), El Toxyque (banjo, pipa, jaw harp and other instruments) and Zeno Gabaglio (electronic cello). The seven tracks on Cemento were recorded between 2015 and 2020 in an eclectic →
Council of Europe, ISBN 978-9287191496, English, 272 pages, 2022, France
This is an edited anthology of texts that offer critical positions on AI and its all-encompassing effects on society. In the introduction, Ćosić demands a →
In our daily life, we are surrounded by an enormous quantity of electrical and electronic appliances and are immersed in an invisible and dense network of radio frequencies and electromagnetic fields. Discussions on the potential effects of such exposure on →
LP – self-published
Louise Manifold is a multidisciplinary artist from Ireland who works with a wide range of forms including film, photography, sculpture and text. The focus of her work is often on obsolete and redundant media, a result →
Meatspace Press, ISBN: 978-1913824020, English, 206 pages, 2021, UK
Books like this should make a difference. There is so much hype surrounding AI and its (im)possible solutions to many of our problems, solutions which often →
In the dystopian play “The Ventriloquists’ School” by Alejandro Jodorowsky, a ‘free man’ falls into a deserted street and, panicked, takes refuge in a non-place populated by slaves and masters where puppets and manoeuvres live under the control of the →
CD – Thrill Jockey
Even an unknown composer such as Bogusław Schaeffer can become the focus for the electronic manipulations of Drew Daniel and Martin C. Schmidt, the Baltimore duo who work under the moniker of Matmos. Throughout their careers, →
Aksioma / Mladinski center Velenje, ISBN: 978-9617173000, English, 230 pages, 2022, Slovenia
Within the contemporary media landscape, the interview format is typically used to capture ‘momentum’ – it presents the personal opinions of a current →
Choreographic Camouflage is the result of a collaboration between architect and director Liam Young and choreographer Jacob Jonas in the form of a dance performance and film. It is an artistic response to new technology developed in China that automatically →
