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.
‘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 →
CD – Mousikelab
This is the debut album for the Ether trio from Florence whose members are Andrea Brancali, Andrea Masi and Francesco Bigazzi, an ensemble halfway between refined minimal electronica sequences, →
The sky has always been one of the favorite topics in Dutch visual art. Sometimes blue, sometimes grey, covered or clear, far more visually interesting than flat green polders, the Dutch sky has unquestionable →
CD – Crónica
A new collaborative project by Stephan Mathieu and Janek Shaefer, after their experience at Mutek in Canada, in 2002, the first time these two artists →
In the talk entitled ‘Ontology Is Overrated’ he gave at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology conference in March 2005, Clay Shirky claims that current categorization methods (taxonomies and schemes), are giving place to more →
CD – I Dischi Di Angelica
Loops with different lengths, mixed with a computer with a 432Hz carrier signal, a careful choice of chords reminiscent of the classical tradition and expressed →
The locative dimension give us indefeasible points of reference in the daily networked and speedy life. But the process of ‘mapping’ is not obvious nor neutral, even if it has become so easy →
CD – Xperimental Intermedia
It seems that the Canadian author Matt Rogalsky is attracted by absence and a sort of proposing stasis, in his creative maelstrom halfway between iterative music, drones →
A series of loose connections, blistering fast and, most of all, completely improvised. These are the traits of a Breadboard Band performance. They use a breadboard for electronic circuits test, producing sessions of audiovisual →
dvd video – IAMAS
Confronting two different cultures is better when both are on the road, so out of their protective and familiar shells (the houses or the offices). The intriguing experiment of grouping some ‘Mobnauts’ →
CD – Smekkleysa / Audioglobe
This Bjork (that is, Kristin Bjork Kristiansdottir), too, comes from Iceland. After experiences in the Kitchen Motors collective and in Big and Brútal, she’s now going →
According to Armin Medosch, in an interconnected environment, individuality or expression are neither important. What’s important are the new forms of sharing, spreading and planning the digital work. →
CD – Planet Mu/Goodfellas
Experimental and shaky electronica, flamboyant audio-abuse, breakcore, jungle, techno and mash-ups, all together, recorded (without any interventions) during a live performance by Tim Exile, an artist with a drun’n’bass past who →
With Academy a video installation presented at bitform gallery in New York, R. Luke DuBois carries on his research about the construction of pop-cultural ephemera and its inherent temporal value structure. DuBois is →
