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.
Check the Transmediale photo set here.
What’s the role of big digital culture festivals? Once it was related to giving spectators access to physical or incorporeal works of art and performances, and giving them a →
CD – Spekk Japan
This release is included in an elegant and purposely oversized digipack, made out by ‘The Alps’ a group whose members are Jefre Cantu-Ledesma, Alexis Georgopoulos and Scott Hewicker. →
Carnival is one of the few festivities that has not been yet commodified by some big entertainment, media or soft drink corporation. In Europe its ancient roots are often intertwined with the territory and →
CD – Plinkity Plonk
After ‘Holiday Diary’ in 2003, this is Enrico Wuttke’s, aka Flim, second release on Plinkity Plonk, a Korm Plastics parent label. It is made up of piano inspired music, an →
book+dvd – debalie / NAi Publishers – ISBN 905662539X
From the oral tradition on, the power of communication was strictly connected to control, memory and imaginary. The latter was and →
CD – Korm Plastics
This is a composite production, with a guitar-based and neo-impro approach that deals also with the most recent glitch paradigms, articulating redundant sounds. This kind of sounds are rich →
A huge machine to create abstract paintings. This is the shape of the Giant Painting Machine, a project by Douglas Irving Repetto. It’s an electro-mechanic system mainly assembled with waste materials. It →
CD – Satamile
The Blotnik Brothers are a Swedish trio, devoted to electro sounds, founded in 1999 by Martin Rasberg and Roberto Mensa, and joined then by Patrick Casey. They are distinguished by a →
Which are the visual rules that are stimulating attention? How abstract objects o image’s areas are look-catalyzing? These are the questions behind View Finder Heatmap, a project inspired by the last 25 →
CD – Cronica
Shrill and charming sounds, bass and iterated frequencies, hypnotic drones, synthetic vibrations, hinting also to organic dimensions. Similarly to metallic insects’ breaths, in the dark bubbling of weird spaces and →
Throughout the twentieth century western society was dominated by the machine. The fascination artists held for the beauty and power of mechanical processes established an enduring dialogue between creativity and technology. Many contemporary →
CD – Adnoiseam / Goodfellas
Breakcore generates hybrid fruits, developed from the insertion of very dissimilar sensibilities, that, for instance, produce this ‘art noveau’ artwork. The Adnoiseam experts prepared all these sounds →
3″ CD – Hibari
A musical ear is always needed. In 1958 John Cage, was a contender in an Italian quiz show (as a mushroom expert), and →
Paul Slocum is a Texan artist with a computer science degree who creates original music and video with obsolete computers and videogame consoles like the Commodore 64 and the Atari →
