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.
one sided white vinyl LP + poster + insert – Ricerca Sonora
These three algorithmic compositions from newcomer Pier Alfeo and released on the Ricerca Sonora label were made with Wolfram – the programming language of the Mathematica software system, →
Let us consider the visualisation of processes as a component of contemporary sensibility. Artists have often made use of simplifying these processes through metaphorical visual and aural representation. Kathy Hinde has done this through a sublime practise. Her “Earthquake Mass →
Parabola Press, English, 180 pages, 2021, UK
Access to the brain and mind is now more possible than ever. Neuroscience has entered mass culture and become popular both through the radical simplification of its findings →
CD – Mode Records
This first complete recording of Stries is published by Mode Records, a New York label focusing on contemporary classical music and other forms of avant-garde performance. Stries is a composition for three synthesizers and a tape →
In Mythic Landscape, Laura Criollo Carrillo allows the audience to enter a revealing space where the invisible and inaudible manifest. She uses infrared light and artificial electromagnetic fields that emit sounds outside our audible spectrum. She uses a modified digital →
UCL Press, ISBN-13: 978-1787359765, English, 276 pages, 2021, UK
“Decolonising science is […] to understand that the universal, abstract knowledge Western science has produced […] is only one kind of knowledge among many others that →
CD + booklet – Crónica
Máquina Magnética are an experimental all-star combo featuring Pedro Tudela, Miguel Carvalhais, Gustavo Costa and Rodrigo Carvalho. Tudela and Carvalhais are known for their project @c and as founders of Crónica, the record label behind →
DEPART group defines gardening as one of the most archetypal art forms. It encompasses many components, including aesthetics, practice and failure, and the recognition of complexity. Their “The Entropy Gardens” is a work of art that can be experienced in →
Yale University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0300209570, English, 336 pages, 2021, USA
This is meant to be a conceptual atlas of Artificial Intelligence with all the context it deserves, far beyond the projections of our fascination with →
cassette + folding card box and 4 photo cards – farpoint recordings | K7
The Telepathic Lockdown Tapes is a release from Mick O’Shea and Danny McCarthy, an Irish sound art and improvisation duo formed under the moniker The Quiet →
Neural 70, Alternative Metaverses . Subscribe now!
Issue #70 Autumn 2021 ISSN: 2037-108X
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How heavy is the cloud? It is not easy to refute its iconic meaning, which is soft and particularly light, not to mention its total invisibility, except for some elements in GUIs. The harsh reality of heavy and energy-devouring servers, →
transcript Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-837653311, English, 264 pages, 2021, Austria
The technologically enhanced senses that humans and machines acquire and negotiate with each other have changed the way we perceive materiality and decipher reality. Photosensitivity in →
CD + book – Raster
With the unusual title ‘OpticoAcoustic Oracle’, Greek sound artist and aural experimenter Thanasis Kaprouliasalias, alias Novi_sad, presented an audiovisual project in the ancient city of Olympia on the eve of the flame lighting ceremony for →
