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.
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0367356774, English, 162 pages, 2020, UK
Automating Vision, The Social Impact of the New Camera Consciousness
emerges from the fact that we now live among “seeing machines” of various kinds equipped with sophisticated →
We have yet to fully understand the dimension and cultural implications of the post-industrial deterioration, with media archaeology on one side reconstructing processes and trajectories, and chemistry on the other to save us from the consequence of that decline. “High →
CD + book – Fancyyyyy
With a packaging whose design is due to Joe Gilmore and Florian Hecker’s refined font manipulation, printed in two distinct colors, metallic silver and black, with a thirty-page booklet written by Curtis Roads, himself a →
Organscape by Xoan Xil is an installation formed by “Organismo I”, an ensemble of delicate kinetic machines designed to emulate the repertoire of natural world sounds, with four short corresponding pieces for organ (Organscape I – IV), obtained from the →
CD – Important
All of the tracks on this release from Mo H. Zareei (mHz) derive their names from mathematical functions which in turn are used to generate the sounds and give form to tonal and rhythmic structures. The raw →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262039648, English, 136 pages, 2019, USA
When design enables an underlying structural revelation, it transcends its usual purpose of supporting the enjoyment of content, elevating the printed medium to a higher level. →
Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR), or the “tingling sensation moving down the back of the neck and upper spine”, has inspired the production and upload of millions of YouTube videos designed to induce it. The powerful physical feeling induced from →
CD – Unsounds
What is the thin line dividing a live performance, a studio work and being part of an artistic installation where a large number of people can participate? Yannis Kyriakides and Andy Moor opted for a halfway position →
Attached to a future ‘neutrino telescope’ experiment in 2023, a device will be submerged 2.6 kms deep into the Cascadia Basin (Pacific Ocean) in the North of California. This device is Jol Thoms’ “Radio Amnion” project, a platform which commissions →
Vinyl 12″ – 4Bit
Tracks one to six in NOK were originally released by Mego in 2000 as a 3” mini-cd. Here they have been remastered from the original DAT tapes and cut to vinyl by Kassian Troyer at Dubplates →
Gruenrekorder, ISBN-13: 194491607760, English, 120 pages, 2020, Germany
“un|sounding the self — a portrait” is a film portraying two composers, Christopher Shultis and Craig Shepard, whose trajectories are in dialogue. The first person tale of →
Pioneering media artist Bruce Nauman has dedicated a good part of his life to exploring his own condition as artist. He used his own studio as the stage for performances involving himself during the 1970s and 1980s, until in “Mapping →
Vinyl 12″ – Moozak
Brigitta Bödenauer and Susanna Gartmayer, or BBSG, Black Burst Sound Generator, is both the title of the project and the moniker of this duo. The term derives from analogue video technology. This pair do not hide →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517907082, English, 416 pages, 2019, USA
Variations on Media Thinking is a much needed selection of Zielinski’s texts for non-German speakers, made of eighteen translated essays, produced over several →
