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 – Room 40
A long time has passed since some non-mainstream scenes started talking about ‘illbient’, a word coined – in fact – by DJ Olive that better defined and promoted, →
CD – Winds Measure
After opening the stylish white rectangular cardboard box, reading a subtle quotation – in English – from the philosopher Jacques Derrida about the difference – in his opinion →
Connect is a kinetic sculpture which models chaos with oscillating spheres of steel. The artwork, created by German Andreas Muxel, produces complex behaviour, although its structure and rules are very simple. It consists of →
CD – Domizil
Eccentric passages, modulated in equally atypical waveforms, occasionally sound crooked and elastic. They are followed by more muffled and grainy concatenations; a chromatic addition of effect and perceptive starts. Decidedly →
Routledge, ISBN 9780415961325, U.S.A., 2008, English
Christian Fuchs is a young and talented Austrian social scientist who focuses his research on information-society theory. In this text he’s constructing a social theory of →
CD – Free Software Series
Otherworldly desires, dense atmospheres, gloomy and rarefied, drones and wide textures, the ‘Trilogie Des Fantômes’ is project by Julien Ottavi, also known as The Noiser – a →
Swing, 2009
conceptual photoshop use
(tags: visual art)
ThinkGeek :: Mixtape Memory Stick
Mixtapes are an art lost in a dead medium
(tags: music hacking visual sound)
Chris Musgrave, Oscilloclast, 2002-2004
Image and sound are delivered as a singular, dense experience. Electricity is shaped into audio wave →
Have you ever wondered what to do with your leftover food scraps from dinner? You usually have two options: 1) Throw them in the garbage or 2) Find somewhere to compost. Examining this →
CD – Zeitkratzer
Live sessions recorded at the Volksbühne am Rosa Luxemburg-Platz in Berlin, during November 2005, and at the Donaufestival Krems, in Austria, the following year, are used here →
Die Gestalten Verlag, ISBN 9783899552171, Germany, 2008, English
There was a clear need for a luscious book about the many, different, fascinating manifestations of what used to be called “data porn” (raw →
2CD – 12K
Delicate sequences, rarefied samples followed by silence, active suspensions and short drones, reminiscent of Cage’s main intuition: that sounds include a certain absence. The opposite is also true, and →
Nowhere / Now / Here photo set
Nowhere / Now / Here is an exhibition organized by LABoral, Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial of Gijón: 78 works by 67 artists from 20 countries, exhibited →
CD – Seeland
Deconstructing previous forms, and taking a different approach from more normal genres, Negativland (mainly a Mark Hosler production), in a work called ‘Thigmotactic, looks to reveal the evident affinities in →
Cdr 3″ – White Line Editions
A collaborative project; the result of similar intentions and musical strategies. Fourm and Shinkei both submit respective compositions to this work – two individual tracks →
