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.
Neural #68 (Gaia Guardians) is an intervention by artist Patricia Domínguez in the form of a printed zine and meditation (“The Blinded Toucan: A Shape-shifting Meditation”). It is a documentation of her personal journey through water conflicts in South America, →
CD – Sub Rosa
Compared to the previous decade, the eighties were a period of political and philosophical retreat. However, during this period, many experimental trends were still in play, especially among the counter-cultural groups located in the main European →
Internet Teapot, English, 20 to 40 pages, 2020, The Netherlands
This zine was conceived just before the pandemic and has outlasted it. It was co-created during workshops in Barcelona, Berlin and Linz. The editors were →
Spotify users know the feeling of being understood by a system whose proprietary algorithm analyses and produces the perfect, tailored consumption machine. It dissects the basic elements of its 70 million track database to qualify and quantify each track, down →
CD – Crónica
GML Variations by Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela stems from an initial composition presented alongside other works in a public screening at the Casa da Música, in Porto. The focus of this event was the Robotic Gamelan, →
The MIT Press, EAN: 9780262044004, English, 328 pages, 2020, USA
Data Feminism is perfectly framed by an opening gambit that asks: data science by whom and for whom?, arguing that we understand data as “intersecting →
The concept of the loop is seminal in computer programming, and probably one of the most emblematic to the history of industrial automation. In “Perpétuité I,” Felix Luque Sanchez built a mechatronic system in a loop in which one machine →
Cassette – Birmingham Record Company
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells’ performance art is unusual and surprising. The two artists produced a simple and powerful outcome whose sonic implications are very engaging. The performance is also very significant in terms of →
grapefruits.online, English, 28 pages, 2019-2020, Germany
At last we are witnessing much needed attention paid to women composers in experimental and electronic music. The ground breaking work of pioneering and contemporary women artists is increasingly →
We are in 2048. Timo is a small artificially intelligent agent and the main character of Unexpected Scenery, a critical game by artist JooYoung Oh. The aim of the game is to help Timo get as much data as possible →
LP – Minus Habens
This latest release by Ivan Iusco was recorded in his Los Angeles studios. Synthagma features twelve tracks, three of which (“Head On Fire”, “Fly’s Heart” and “The Other Side”) are written in collaboration with Kid Moxie, →
IDPURE éditions, ISBN-13: ISBN: 978-2970099260, English, 442 pages, 2020, Switzerland
Much like in the past with mass media (radio and television), we have very little idea of the real world behind the media devices we →
There’s a paradox in our technically advanced environment: although sophisticated sensors and techniques have been developed to appeal to almost all of our senses, they almost exclusively target our visual senses. Even the new wave of VR content and experiments →
12” Vinyl – Music Information Centre Lithuania
The Aidija chamber choir pays homage to Bronius Kutavičius, one of the most important figures of Lithuanian musical culture, a composer largely inspired by “cultural archaeology”, from the national polytheistic tradition and at →
