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.
The edition 2007 of Transmediale, festival for art and digital culture, entitled Unfinished opens on 30th January at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. It’s the 20th edition of the festival formerly known →
CD – !K7/Audioglobe
This is a remix album, the last official act for a couple of producers and djs that was a strong influence on the last years history of experimental / beatz (or →
Youtube, or as we could call it the place of DIY TV, publishes also on the web a huge quantity of rare videos. One of these rarities is the hijacking of the Chicago →
CD – and/OAR
Marc Behrens and Paulo Raposo made this recordings one by one at the beginning, on board a ferry boat and in other places near the Lisbon →
Reading another person’s journal can be pure voyeurism or an interesting insight into lives very different from your own. Thanks to personal blogs we are getting so used to this form of ‘sharing’ that →
CD – Nexsound
Perlonex is an electro-acoustic trio founded in 1998 made up by Ignaz Schick, Jorg Maria Zeger and Burkhard Beins. On the occasion of the Perlonex’s fifth live concerts anniversary they →
The third edition of the Share festival (previous editions in 2005 and 2006) is opening on February 23rd atthe Albertina Academy of Art in Turin. For the first year a prize was established, →
CD – Strange Fortune
An electronic production rich in elegant textures, diluted sounds and dreaming atmospheres, mostly thanks to the iterated melodies that peep out from strange voices and meditative drones. Gloomy →
CD – !K7 / Audioglobe
This is a reissue of one historical Matthew Herbert records: ‘100 lbs’, printed in 1996, that was the summa of three different former works. This version add to the →
cd-rom – Electronic Literature Organization – ISSN 19322011
Even if (unfortunately) mostly celebrated in the native English, electronic literature is a huge, and often underestimated field of research in terms →
CD – Touch
The shrill, worried seagulls’ clamor before the storm, a natural but at the same time alien sound sequence, a signal of an important climatic change, amplified →
Offline – Online Publishing: The Love for Print in an Age of Electronic Media is a conference on the paper/pixel dual and controversial relationship. It’s scheduled for the 19th of January (today), at the →
Second Life, one of the most populated MMORPG, is an important watching point to verify how the borderline between real and virtual tends to become more and more ephemeral. In the last months →
CD – Beau Brun
Songbirds of the world unite, Cagesan (small chirping birds coming from Tasmania) will be your vanguard. Everybody can be a rockstar, the super-goldfinch said (and we agree of course). →
