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+dvd video – L’arc d’apparition – ohmavtr34
Time-based media art is a generic label applied to all the arts involving time as one of the mandatory coordinates to experience the works. John Oswald →
CD – Häpna/Risonanza Magnetica
Giuseppe Ielasi is back, a finest experimental musician, composer and guitarist, form a long time attracted by non-conventional and improvised sonorities, disseminated through his own Fringes Recordings, in hybrid electronic defilements, →
CD – The Helen Scarsdale Agency
This is a collaborative project by M. S. Waldron, Steven Stapleton, Sigtryggur Berg Sigmarsson, Jim Haynes and R. K. Faulhaber, extremely homogeneous in its nonetheless different →
book – Selektion – ISBN 3934801021
Resolving Interactions is an interactive computer-light installation that codes interaction with art as a daily experience in a place meant for a different purpose, as the →
One of the most interesting projects that combined science, environmental awareness and art was PigeonBlog, by Beatriz da Costa, with Cina Hazegh and Kevin Ponto. It was based on equipping pigeons with →
CD + booklet – Unsounds
This is the fifth release by the composer and sound designer Yannis Kyriakides, a project made of twelve different electronic tracks based on interviews extracted from the →
The tilting sensor embedded in some of the latest Apple laptops has induced many projects focused on experimenting new interaction methods. netPong by Oriol Ferrer Mesià, is a software that allows to play Pong →
CD – Baskaru
Stefano De Santis, also known as Urkuma (a slang term coming from the Italian region where this author lives that means “a state of physical uncertainty”), gives us →
Auditory Seismology is a project developed by Florian Dombois, director of the Institute for Transdisciplinarity at the Bern University of the Arts. The starting point is observing that the frequency spectrum of a →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Rave urges, digital excesses, audio-abuse. Mutations of the electronic underground mixing alien rhythms and frequencies, mashing and speeding up every influence, without mediations. Pure energy: drug, →
The progress bar is probably one of the most recognized icons of everyday digital screen-based communication. It expresses time, and the lag the machines are imposing on us, through their hidden coded mechanisms. The →
CD – Staubgold
These rarefied and fascinating elaborations are a new beginning for Rafael Toral, who casts aside his guitars, pedals and effects to use a new musical system that incorporates elements →
dvd video – Lowave – EDV 1394
The invisible geometry of the urban landscape has pervaded every inhabited space. The feeling of being into a full scale model of a recursive →
‘Livecoding’ is the activity of writing a program, or part of it, while it runs. It thus deeply connects algorithmic causality with the perceived outcome and it allows code to be brought into play →
