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.
McCarthy is brilliantly developing a line of performances (as in LAUREN), where she directly engages with technology as a person, consciously re-introducing elements of human vulnerability. “I heard TALKING IS DANGEROUS” is one of the most powerful artworks about the →
3.5″ Floppy Disk 1,44 MB – Pionierska
Pionierska is a micro label founded in 2014 whose releases are mainly on 3.5″ floppy disks and magnetic tape audio cassettes. The aesthetic adopted is immediately clear, to be absolutely outside any commercial →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262044158, English,, 336 pages, 2020, USA
Our ongoing dialog with machines has shifted from straightforward technical procedures to increasingly anthropomorphic forms of engagement. This rapid evolution in the use of interfaces →
I’m never at ease in a crowd… I often end up observing people as if they were “other” from me and I often get lost in trying to quantify and shape the thoughts of the people around me. Every time →
Vinyl 12″ – Gruenrekorder
Contact microphones are the tools used by Michael Lightborne, positioned close to the concrete pylons supporting the Coventry Ring Road, the huge dual-carriageway flanking the hometown of Delia Derbyshire. The road was built between the →
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN-13: 978-0997874464, English, 124 pages, 2020, Germany
The Nomadic Listener is defined by Chattopadhyay as an ‘augmented book’. It is made of a stream of thoughts, generated by the itinerant author, psychogeographically exploring →
Computational writing in the post-digital era is as systemic as computational imaging, just not as visible. The algorithmic elaboration of texts by big systems and platforms extracts sense and adapts it to standards and rules, without us noticing. In “Codependent →
CD – Thrill Jockey
The piece begins with a tribute to the artist and activist Gustav Metzger – one of the founding fathers of kinetic painting and a theorist auto destructive art. In the composition, the confluence of voices and →
Onomatopee Projects, ISBN-13: 978-9493148192, English, 96 pages, 2020, The Netherlands
Already attentive to the formidable impact of digital images, Onomatopee publishes the inaugural issue of the new Resolution annual magazine, which programmatically “tackles images in →
The mapping of invisible WiFi networks has been an inspiration for different artworks since the 2000s, following their global proliferation. As invisible gateways to the whole online world, they can be perceived as an active presence that our mobile devices →
CD – esc.rec.
All the compositions in this new album by Francisco López for esc.rec. date to 2019 and were recorded in Den Haag, Milan, Riga, Prague, Mmabolela and Loosduinen. They are brought together here to resonate in a coherent →
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: →
