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.
Sousveillance – The Art of Inverse Surveillance – Conference at Aarhus University, February 6-8 2009
Conference, public interventions and concert
(tags: art hacktivism hacking festival)
Kning Disk, ISBN 9789197666701, Sweden, 2007, English
Henrik Rylander is an artist, musician and photographer. This work is a large format book of photographs of loudspeakers taken in the three largest Swedish →
swissmiss: Nothing is Original
a nice text by Jim Jarmush
(tags: art copyright)
Anti datamining is a transversal research project based on the recovery and the viewing/visualization of internet financial data flows. It aims at creating audiovisual environments written, fed and updated in real-time. The project finds →
igmade.edition, ISSN 1865-9357, Germany, 2008, English / German
Edited in Stuttgart by Asli Serbest, Mona Mahall and Gerd de Bruyn, this “Fanzine for Electronics and Aesthetics” is the newest experiment in →
BotJunkie » EATR Robot Runs On Soylent Green
Engine maker Cyclone Power and Robotic Technologies have teamed up to build a robot called EATR, which stands for Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot. When they say “energetically autonomous,” it means that EATR will →
The associations between sound and visuals have been one of the primary topics of media art aesthetics in the last twenty years, but technically they are still stuck in a few categories, including →
DVD + CD – Sudamerica Electronica
Sudamerica Electronica, a new label based in Buenos Aires, articulates most of its research around the concept of ‘extreme noise and extreme nature’, enchantments that, in →
Routledge, ISBN 9780415961325, U.S.A., 2008, English
The “gargantuan book about media art” seems to be trademark ZKM. This new tome is 840 pages and weights 3.5 kilos, and is similar to “Future →
CD – Aural Terrains
Field recordings and grainy sounds, multifaceted audio insertions, several settings – natural, metropolitan and industrial contexts – intense connections, spiky frequencies and meditative drones. Kim Cascone in ‘Music →
Morten Riis: Digital Sound Drawings (Crónica)
“Digital Sound Drawings”, by danish composer Morten Riis, is a collection of 6 pieces composed through the drawing of images and their direct conversion into sound.
(tags: art visual sound music)
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 →
