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 – Cut
Recorded in Gabriel Paiuk’s home studio, in Buenos Aires, on November 30, 2004, “Breathings” marks the encounter of two different, but not too far apart, sensitivities: the “improvising” one of →
Ars Electronica 2006 photo set.
During the last ten years Ars Electronica themes have tried to be the litmus paper for the digital scene. In 2003, the epiphany of software art, the object of research was ‘CODE: →
2CD – Crónica
From Lithuania, via Crónica Electronica (Portugal), comes a double CD that’s explosive in its articulations of refined experimental sequences, minimal and abstract. It’s an incursion in post-techno territories by Gintas →
CD – Persistencebit Records – bit013
Software has broken the concept of video as a flowing unity, transforming it in a an artificial visual ecosystem. Scott Pagano, curator of the →
CD – Crouton
Abstract, very delicate but still rigorous electronic constructions by Robert Hampton and Steven Hess, refined experimenters now with Crouton after many releases for Sub Rosa, →
BrainWaves is a project of complex systems’ data representation, like the human brain, developed at the Georgia Tech University by the students of neural engineering (prof. Steve Potter). The experiment is based upon the →
Cheating acts have a special (controversial) place in performing art history. They are acknowledged as challenging performance. Nevertheless the real troubles with the law involved put them in a critical limbo. Awarded →
CD – Planet Mu/Goodfellas
Wrapped in the very elegant and suggestive apocalyptic artwork by Arnold Steiner of AS1 Projects, here is the new album by Aaron Funk, better known as Venetian Snares, →
Connecting worlds is the first exhibition after the temporary stop of the Tokyo based ICC activities, and that’s a good news indeed. Curated by Yukiko Shikata it deals also with the concept of communication →
CD – Persistence Bit
Andy Vaz, a German DJ and producer with an indisputable talent, releases this for an Italian label, Persistence Bit, owned by Alessandro Vaccaro and based in Catania, a peripheral →
dvd video – Blackchair, Microcinema – MC-547
The vj culture is tangible in a lot of contemporary video works. The germs of the non-linear narrative (that were enabled and spread by PC →
CD – Very Friendly / Tigerbeat6 / Wide
Miguel Manuel De Pedro, AKA Kid606, goes all the way. He’s a sound saboteur who, with this amusing title, produces a fat techno electronic dance. →
It starts on September 13th in Berlin the fourth edition of Wizard of OS, the festival of free software and free knowledge (previous editions in 1999, 2001 and 2004). One of →
