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.
USB Card + booklet – NUKFM / Rizosfera
XIII Rumori Santi is 45 minutes long and features eleven tracks. These tracks are the work of ecologist and sound sculptor Giuseppe Cordaro and add to the already broad catalogue of NUKFM, a →
Lost in the artificial sounds and noises that populate our daily soundscape, we may forget how physics and chemistry can produce unique and continuous sound sources to delve into. Clay Breath by Gemma Luz Bosch, for example, implements a simple →
CD – No Type
Once referred to as the ‘Harry Potter of the digital vanguard’, Eryk Salvaggio was an early pioneer of the net art movement. His focus now is still relentless. Salvaggio uses artificial intelligence as a tool for →
Since we know that the extinction of species is accelerating, we have a deeper sense of disconnection when it comes to endangered species. The feeling that living things are disappearing affects our already compromised confidence that we can no longer →
Tsonami Arte Sonoro, ISSN: 0719-4625, Spanish, 68 pages, 2021, Chile
Tsonami Arte Sonoro is an excellent festival of sound art in Valparaiso, Chile (see Neural #45), which carries out a range of related activities including record →
CD + booklet – 901 Editions
Leaving is the third collaboration between New York-based artists Ben Vida and Marina Rosenfeld, following on from Feel Anything (iDEAL Recordings) and Vertice (Fridman Gallery). This time the duo has conceived a generative four-loudspeaker →
Minne Atairu is a researcher and artist who studies the impact of colonialism on West African art. In her project Igùn, she uses artificial intelligence in a new context: to re-imagine a past that has been stolen. She explores the →
Mörel Books/Sharjah Art Foundation/The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-1907071805, English, 400 pages, 2021, USA
Omar Kholeif has produced an extensive body of exhibitions and books on the impact of the online dimension through the critical lens →
LP + booklet – Domizil
Between 2010 and 2018, Thomas Rohrer, a musician accustomed to working with unconventional field recordings, embarked on a series of trips through Brazil and Switzerland – two geographical regions that are anything but homogeneous. Rohrer →
OnlyFans, perhaps the largest website in the world where users can post content that is not allowed elsewhere, is a successful business model for monetising the increasingly consolidated like mechanism. On one side are the content creators – artists, personal →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190065713, English, 294 pages, 2020, UK
In the essential process of reversing perspective from the traditional human-centred view to ecology as a whole, new strategies for analysing media systems can provide →
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 →
