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.
Yuko Mohri’s Solo is an installation whose conception was shaped by the advent of the pandemic. Originally conceived as a multidisciplinary collaborative piano, it was changed when the artist decided to move to a place in nature to protect herself →
LP – Staalplaat
386 DX is one of Alexei Shulgin’s most acclaimed releases. Shulgin is one of the most well-known net artists of the 2000s and the author of seminal works and historical texts including Introduction to net.art with Natalie →
Valiz, ISBN: 978-9492095817, English, 552 pages, 2021, The Netherlands
This book is a 360-degree tour of the role of the graphic designer and the recognition of their specific weight in communication. The book is divided into three main parts, but →
Earthquakes are usually perceived as terrifying, as the hidden force shaking the soil. Everything about it is unpredictable, unexpected and uncontrollable. But if we see its powerful seismic waves as mere frequencies, we can handle them differently. “Tremor” by Juan →
CD – Thrill Jockey
Mouse On Mars’ Dimensional People is a 2018 album that featured interventions from 50 musicians who subsquently formed an orchestra that included percussive robots and special apps for smartphones, resulting in an intriguing live performance. This →
Christoph Merian Verlag, ISBN: 978-3856169497, English, German, 146 pages, 2020, Germany
This is not a typical catalogue for an eponymous exhibition. “H.o.m.e – Home For Obsolete Media” at Kunsthaus Langenthal was curated by Raffael →
Misinformation about climate change has historically been spread by right-wing, denialist and industrial polluter groups. Various strategies include the automated production and distribution of content via fake social media profiles. In this regard, Synthetic Messenger, a project by Tega Brain →
CD – Unsounds
In this “cycle of transhuman songs for computerized human voices” the author eschews both the classic models of what is a cyber-song (Laurie Anderson or Holly Herndon, for example) and the temptation to easily please the audience, →
UV Éditions, ISBN: 978-2956275350, French, 512 pages, 2021, France
Following a well-received exhibition at the contemporary art centre Les Tanneries, the collective RYBN has edited this remarkable anthology of texts on the liminal extra-territories defined →
Human relationships are based on presence, on exchange, on physicality. And yet, the emptiness of an absence can sometimes take on a significance and power beyond presence itself. Perhaps, in a similar way, artificial intelligence, though far from faithfully tracing →
CD – Opa Loka
Richard van Kruysdijk, aka Cut Worms, follows his two previous releases on Opa Loka – Cable Mounds and Lumbar Fist – with Breath Mule, a distinctive and hybridized aesthetic that can be found in the subtle →
Onomatopee, ISBN: 978-9493148444, English, 256 pages, 2021, The Netherlands
Forget fantasies of shiny cyborgs or obedient, flawless robots ready to serve human will. The real-life mix of the organic and the artificial in the Anthropocene →
The recent revival of attention to space exploration and the possibility of life on other planets has revived the debate about possible extraterrestrial life forms. FORMATA by Proto-Alien Project (Proto-A), a group consisting of Juan M. Castro and Akihiro Kubota, →
CD – Leaf
Murcof, aka Fernando Corona, returns to his debut label – the Leaf – for the first time in thirteen years, after The Versailles Sessions, the latest album in a full-bodied series of five extended format releases in →
