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 + booklet – Toxo Records
In Machine Milieu, Agostino Di Scipio and Dario Sanfilippo release twelve tracks dominated by raw and otherworldly sounds. The album also comes with a 16-page booklet that includes a visual analysis of the tracks →
“This Sculpture Doesn’t Exist” recalls in its title some well-known endless generators of machine-generated photorealistic results. But Matteo Rattini created it as a weighted process driven by some conceptual coordinates. He trained a neural network to generate images of sculptures →
Uniformbooks, ISBN-13: 978-1910010266, English, 240 pages, 2021, UK
This is the third anthology on sound art practices by Cathy Lane & Angus Carlyle (founders of CRiSAP – Creative Research in Sound Arts Practice at the →
LP + booklet – Noton
HYbr:ID I features eight compositions from Carsten Nicolai, under the Alva Noto moniker. They were originally commissioned to score Richard Siegal’s choreographed performance ‘Oval’, performed by the Staatsballett Berlin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2019. →
The feeling that time is flying by, coupled with the anxiety of impending deadlines, has become a distinctive trait of our insane standards of hyperproductivity. The feeling of inescapability arising from the sense of insufficient time, which comes in overwhelming →
Valiz, ISBN-13: 978-9493246010, English, 352 pages, 2021, The Netherlands
Annet Dekker is a specialist curator and dedicated author of a series of self-authored (‘Collecting and Conserving Net Art‘) and edited books (‘archive2020‘, ‘Lost and Living →
LP – Concentric Records>
Produced by Concentric Records, this new release from Tobias Freund immediately grabs our attention with its Fellini reference on the cover, showing the actor Marcello Mastroianni in La Città delle Donne. “I have movies in my →
The aleatoric voices of the street vendors are so situated in time (exactly when we pass by) and space (always in the same place) in such a way that they easily become memories or connections with stable coordinates. Coro Informal →
smallest functional unit, ISBN-13: 978-3000701610, English, 64 pages, 2021, Germany
The encoding of information for a performative act is the fundamental mechanism behind notation and the creation of scores. This Western tradition has been challenged →
CD + insert card + book – Room40
Produced by Room40, Objects Of Interest is an interesting collaboration between Magda Mayas, a German experimental piano player and Tina Douglas, an Australian multidisciplinary artist. Douglas creates visual scores as a way to →
The forgotten quartz clock and its noisy pacing have been very familiar to a couple of generations: its rhythmic sounds have beaten the time of countless people. Gauthier Déplaude has started to use this object as a sound instrument in →
Edinburgh University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1474474382, English, 212 pages, 2021, UK
Environmental sounds are a key element in understanding our current perception of space. They help our senses to locate our bodies and are used in →
CD – Edition Wandelweiser Records
As the title suggests the starting point for this album is a tree in the town of Kranenburg in Germany. Working with MetaSynth, an audio software programme that can create sound from images, Florian Wittenburg has →
As processes become more accomplished and, more importantly, our reliance on machine learning steadily increases, so does our trust in anthropomorphic digital outcomes. This can inevitably lead to a trust in machine-based spiritual assessments, even from the calculations of the →
