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.
intellect, ISBN-13: 978-1783209484, English, 442 pages, 2019, UK
Investigating media art in a limited geographical territory has frequently been attempted with mixed results, often claiming tenuous connections between the specific use of technologies and the →
The so-called “resurgence of analogue” media defines the rediscovery and enthusiasm for analogue technologies over ubiquitous and omnipotent digital technologies. Phonoptic Readers by Enrique del Castillo falls into this category. The artist created an optical-aural system, building himself two optical →
7″ one sided – Kvitnu
If choosing to remain silent is also a linguistic act, Then the greeting that Kotra and Zavoloka address to their audience as the last act before the closure of the label Kvitnu is especially poignant: →
transcript, ISBN-13: 978-3839450505, English, 332 pages, 2019, Germany
It might seem a curious accident that this book was published just before 2020 ushered in a tangible dystopia, but its discussion of utopia, through history, narrative, →
How much does our anthropomorphic vision of machines influence their interpretation? And what do we need to attribute anthropomorphic qualities to a machine? ”The Candle” by Amir Bastan explores these questions through a simple recurring gesture. An industrial robot arm →
10″ Vinyl – Arbitrary
This is the third chapter from Arbitrary in a series launched by Mads Emil Nielsen, Framework, a project focused on open and hand-drawn graphic scores which includes subjective translations by the Danish composer. Nielsen, who grew →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-9083065502, English, 336 pages, 2020, USA
The eagerly awaited new Manovich book is built around an idea he started to publicly formulate in the second half of the 2000s: to →
A Sonic Bike is a bike that plays sounds following the cyclist’s movements and speed, thanks to two speakers positioned on the front under the handlebar and a geo-referenced audio tracking system via GPS. The generated sounds are mapped to →
CD + BOOKLET – Swarming
Eric La Casa reminds us that the urban spaces we travel through and frequent constitute a personal ecosystem of the city – a world unto itself – and that every architectural space contains, on a →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190863845, English, 272 pages, 2019, USA
You won’t open the black box and find a simple ‘if statement’ that reads: ‘if this is a person of colour; then discriminate;’. Similarly, →
Neural 67, Adversarial Tactics. Subscribe now!
Issue #67, Autumn 2020 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now!
You can also subscribe to the magazine Digital Edition accessing all issues since #29.
Or you can buy the magazine from the closest of the almost 200 stores →
In keeping with his tradition of scraping of controversial data, in “Capture” Paolo Cirio has used a series of 1,000 photographs shot during the wave of protests in France, to isolate 4,000 policeman through a Facial Recognition algorithm. This database →
Vinyl 12″ – Le Cabanon
Thomas Pujols, a French producer who uses the moniker Nebulo, is accustomed to persistent experimentation using mostly polyphonic synthesizers, with which he explores harmonies and dissonances, constructing microtones and other tonal scales that escape the →
Mille Plateaux, ISBN-13: 978-3000648168, English, 268 pages, 2020, Germany
Achim Szepanski is the mostly known as the founder of two historical music labels, Force Inc. and Mille Plateaux, but he is a quite distinctive figure →
