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.
Open Source Embroidery
The Open Source Embroidery project was initiated by Ele Carpenter in 2005. The project has grown to support and facilitate a range of artists practice investigating the relationship between programming for embroidery and computing.
(tags: art hacking hacktivism media)
CD – Staalplaat
From the endless catalogue of Muslimgauze recordings, Staalplaat is still able to release an unpublished work in a limited edition of only 700 copies. ‘Sycophant of Purdah’ was originally conceived to →
If there’s one intended victim of the decaying copyrighted music game it is classical music. A great amount of classic music should be totally free, because its copyright expired a long time ago, but →
CD – Shiver Sounds
In this project Phroq, aka Francisco Meirino, uses malfunctioning minidiscs, cassettes and CD players in a work that investigates the glorious end of an amplification system. Together with continuous →
book, DIY, USA, 2009, English
The first two volumes of Wizzywig are professionally self produced comics on hacker topics. They fictionally retell classic stories on the two topics, but any informed reader can →
Eyecode (Interactive Eye-Tracking Installation) on Vimeo
Eyecode (Golan Levin, 2007) is an interactive installation whose display is wholly constructed from its own history of being viewed. By means of a hidden camera, the system records and replays brief video clips of →
CD – Mego
Distorted frequencies and gurgling sounds from the speakers: almost faint. Feeble pulses and sound aggregations emerge. The speakers seem go into a state of coma, as before death. The work →
The Architecture Issue – Data Center Overload – NYTimes.com
Internet invisble infrastructure
(tags: net hacking)
Almost none of the dozens of interactive music tables have escaped the “abstraction” trap, sticking with similar, familiar “elements” made in perfect geometric shapes that assume the identity of “instruments”, “samples”, “drums”, you →
CD – Raster-Noton
Trapped by his own genius, auto-induced to predominantly wear Senor Coconut’s exotic clothes, Uwe Schmidt, aka Atom Heart, aka Atom ™, aka Lassigue Bendthaus now with his first release for →
The Architecture Issue – Data Center Overload – NYTimes.com
Internet invisble infrastructure
(tags: net hacking)
WolframTones: An Experiment in a New Kind of Music
music from Mathematica
(tags: art music sound software science)
CD – Bowindo
From March to July 2008 Palermo held the ‘Doves Days’, ‘Meetings of music, sounds and experimental electronic arts’ – a festival organised for the third time by Antitesi. Works →
cd+, 2009, Kvitnu
This could be defined as “black and white music”: the usual minimal experimental conventions are taken for granted, but then impeccably made consistent in both sound and visual forms. Consistency, →
