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.
It’s hard to know how much we will be represented through cameras rather than in person in the future. Our ‘camera presence’ is not only increasingly accepted but becoming a norm. Trevor Paglen has used his “Bloom” exhibition at Pace →
cassette – Crónica
What do nanotechnologies, innovative industrial food safety processes and experimental music have in common? Is the ‘charm’ of certain sound environments alone enough to inspire an entire album of contemporary experimentation? Yes, if the formal result is →
Leuven University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9462702257, English, 332 pages, 2020, Belgium
If we can relate every medium to our senses, then we might also claim that media art is, more often than not, about our →
There’s a symbolism in the technology we use that is deeper than its daily appearance, especially for the devices that we use the most. In “Shotgun texting”, Exonemo artist group uses a shotgun to shoot a few keyboards of different →
Online – NN
“Current Suite No.1″ by Nuuun is a suite of four audiovisual compositions exploring an interchangeable use of frequencies that we can both see and hear. These compositions are inspired by early 1970s video synthesizers and Scan Processors, →
Nero Editions, ISBN-13: 978-8880560982, Italian, 247 pages, 2020, Italy
Valentina Tanni is a prominent Italian historian of internet art. She has researched and developed a sophisticated discourse about internet visual subcultures. In this book she →
Mo H. Zareei’s ”Material Music” features eight kinetic sound-sculptures made of an electromechanical actuator striking identical blocks of different solid materials, respectively brass, copper, aluminium, steel, hardwood, softwood, glass, and marble. The shifts in striking time are calculated through phase-shifting →
CD – 901
The synogram 間 (Ma), a minimal unit of meaning used in Japanese writing, expresses a decisive concept for numerous artistic and philosophical practices, referring to the notion of the space and time between things, focusing on the →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190460167, English, 880 pages, 2019, UK
Five years in the making, this heavy tome is the first of two volumes investigating sound and imagination from a true multidisciplinary perspective (from →
Project Alias, by Bjørn Karmann and Tore Knudsen, is a “parasite” for home devices. It can be customised to control smart assistants. Inspired by a parasitic fungus, this little assistant hides a mic array, a raspberry pi and speaker and →
CD – Raster
There is no future without tears and here the work centres on sensory processing by human-machine hybrids. It’s not the first time Uwe Schmidt aka Atom™ focuses on sounds bordering on pop, soaked with a glitch aesthetic. →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517905965, English, 240 pages, 2019, USA
What happens when one of the most respected philosophers of the media art scene writes an entire book exploring the work of three →
The golden era of electronic art produced not only primordial generative artworks, screen manipulations and electronic music, but also a few custom-hardware-based sculptures, of which only a small number have been preserved. Eirik Brandal has an interest in such artefacts, →
CD – Wandelweiser
The English word “tracery”, “flechtwerk” in German or “nervatura” in Italian can be translated in different ways, first of all as “interlace”, which is well suited to the idea of intricate electronic music, but also as “embroidery”, →
