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 – Latek
Extremely melodic electronic elaborations, these by Tim Thwaites, Matthew Clare, Jema Davies and Clare Hunt, also known as Radium 88. They’re imbued with melancholy and drone ambient sounds, following →
xxxxx/OpenMute – ISBN 0955066441
Well placed in the underground tradition of obscure and fascinating books, this anthology edited by the Berlin-based collective xxxxx take the challenge to conceptually intertwine two different →
Ludic Society, GoApe Issue #5, Feb 08, 16 pages, ISBN 390238901X
A Branch to Fishkill
Continous Plea for Playsure… Epilogue – La nue remontante l’escalier
Resistance is Futile – Futility is Resistenace! Objects →
DEAF (Dutch Electronic Art Festival) 2007 opens on April 10th in Rotterdam. DEAF is one of the historical electronic arts festivals, and it has been built by V2_, that in 2007 celebrates 25 years →
Thinking about gesture in art, people usually refer to choreography. If the topic is related to IT, instead, usability becomes the issue. But, what about gesture in computer art? Does it mean →
CD – Spekk Japan
Using a computer or other traditional editing methods doesn’t matter. Electronic music as a category can be instinctively connected more to ‘how’ certain sounds are produced than to ‘with →
dvd – FatCat Records – fatsp14dvd
Ruth Jarman and Joseph Gerhardt are very inspired animators. Actually they use ‘motion’ as a complex language, expressing meanings instinctively perceivable. It’s not by accident that they →
CD – Illegal Art
Disembodied pop shards, detached from their original contexts, skillfully recombined with mash-up techniques: it’s Gregg Gillis, (aka Girl Tank), the author of these compulsive but joyous dissections. He →
ChordGeometries 1.1 is a multiplatform application developed by Dmitri Tymoczko (a researched at Princeton University) for a research named “Generalized Chord Spaces”, conducted by Tymoczko himself together with CliftonCallender (Florida State University) and Ian →
CD – 4AD
An intense and nostalgic album, orchestral and classic in its symphonies (worth the best Morricone), whose assumption, transforming peculiar emotions in sound, is not related to human love or →
Laboral Art and Industrial Creation Centre will be inaugurated on March 30. Located in Gijon, Asturias, the building designed by Luis Moya as an orphanage for miners’ children, was then altered and expanded →
3CD in custom-made, circuit-bent packaging – Ubuibi
A wonderful hand-made package for this electronica collection of female artists made out of three CDs, enriched by stylized flyers, stickers, photos and →
In a supposed free-speech society, control over public spaces is paradoxically becoming tighter and tighter and advertising looks more and more like propaganda. Surrounded by ads communicating always the same messages, people →
CD – Dekorder
John Hegre is back with a solo album that intertwines daring experiments with its favorite instrument: the guitar. Here he’s putting on stand by his participation to Jazzkammer group, →
