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.
Big Ideas: Don’t get any – ‘Nude’ by Radiohead -YouTube
James Houston video of old gadget and low fi hardware recreating a beautiful version of Radiohead’s “Nude.”
(tags: music video hacking)
The Integratron
The Integratron is an acoustically perfect tabernacle and energy machine sited on a powerful geomagnetic vortex in the magical Mojave Desert
(tags: music science)
book – The MIT Press – ISBN-13: 978-0262162302
Prof. Frank Popper used to be at cutting edge of art and technology studies with its celebrated “Art of the Electronic Age” book published →
CD – Audiobulb
Non-imaginary places, strictly related to the authors’ dreams and intimate thoughts. They are “favourite places” because “there are places in the world where we come back later”, “places that →
book – The MIT Press – ISBN-13: 978-0262524872
Videogame criticism is still getting its momentum with a prolific production of essays. Meanwhile “Game Studies” departments are sprouting in Universities and Design schools →
CD – Tzadik
In a nutshell: acoustics with tenuous electronica, edited traditional music instruments, sensitive sonorities, highly calibrated but destabilizing. The performance is heartfelt and there’s an extreme diversity within →
Sun Run Sun is an audio installation by media artist Yolande Harris, made during a residency at the Netherlands Media Art Institute (Montevideo), in Amsterdam. The project investigates different modes of perception →
CD – Cnc Record
Guitar improvisations, sensitive and cyclical, which were recorded during a special event at the Sendai’s “Dotmov Festival”, and subsequently edited. The flow is a very contemporary harmony of →
DVD – Weiser Music
For Rechenzentrum electronic images and rhythm have always been equally important. The use of video as an instrument, and the care for music’s visual quality – even though inspired →
2CD – Sub Rosa
Even if the euphoric nomadic and post-structuralist philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari inspire the Sub Rosa label, it is still keen on anthologies like this fifth one, dedicated →
Have you ever dreamt of going home after a long day at work and being able to change the colour of your walls according to your mood? Well, this is what the →
CD – Touch
This album is dedicated to the passing of Phyllis May Jeck, and the notes resonate in an extremely sensitive way, inspired by a resigned quietness, yet at the same →
Smartspaces.org: You’ve never seen a For Rent sign like this
Smartspaces weaves art into the fabric of daily life by placing it in the windows of temporarily vacant property spaces between tenants or in late-stage construction.
(tags: media art)
Flesh-and-Blood Biometrics – Network →
Interactivos? Medialab-Prado Madrid
Interactivos? is a research and production platform for the creative and educational uses of technology with periodical gathering workshops and collaboration to share knowledge.
(tags: art media)
