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.
CD – empreintes DIGITALes
Oscillations planétaires is the first solo album by Chantal Dumas, referencing geological phenomena and processes. Dumas seems to suggest that field recording and electroacoustic sound might have a strong correspondence with cosmic activities. The release is →
ECAL, ISBN-13: 978-2970135647, English, 46 pages, 2020, Switzerland
There have been some experiments with books incorporating a wi-fi server in the past (such as the Weise7 in/compatible Laboratorium Archive), but most of them aim →
Anna Dumitriu has developed a number of artworks that blend DNA with textiles, all in controversial circumstances. Her latest “The Plague Dress” involves a 1665 style raw silk, hand-dyed with walnut husks, referencing Nicholas Culpeper, a herbalist of the time →
CD – Unsounds
The Body Imitates the Landscape is published by Unsounds, a label focused on sound art, contemporary composition and free form experimentation. The project was initially conceived as a sound installation by artist Adi Hollander. Hollander used different →
Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1501337116, English, 202 pages, 2019, USA
How much do we value ‘physical materiality’ in the 2020s? In the dominant tradition of media theory it seems to be valued very little, as either the →
As far back as 1600, the word computer meant someone who does calculations. Someone, not something … that something in fact, had yet to be invented. Today, we all know that calculations are the basis of any trivial operation made →
CD – Galerie Weisser Elefant
Éliane Radigue is a French composer, who was one of the first artists to make use of analog synthetizers, experimenting with other aspects of electroacoustic and minimalist music. The Galerie Weisser Elefant organized a well-deserved →
Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1501347580, English, 202 pages, 2020, USA
One approach to defining a particular cultural scene is to attempt to capture its spirit in some form. This book represents such an attempt for electronic →
Dream expert G. William Domhoff, a distinguished professor and psychology researcher at UC Santa Cruz, has spent decades studying dreams and their meaning. Over the years he has shifted his attention from understanding dreams to understanding the conditions and parts →
12″ vinyl – 90%WASSER
Ditterich von Euler-Donnersperg and Felix Kubin have produced a split EP for 90%WASSER. On the A-side, the first musician presents 8 short and interesting productions, lasting 2-4 minutes each. On the B-side, Kubin has set a →
Aalto University, ISBN-13: 978-9526088228, English, 272 pages, 2020, Finland
The anthology “Field_Notes” included Erich Berger, director of the Bioart Society, among its editors. To celebrate its tenth anniversary (and collaboration with the organisation Biofilia at →
Vinyl 12″ – Not On Label
For Roman Jungblut, a musician and media/sound artist native of Cologne, Back To Where It Never Started is the first solo project where he uses his real name, after years of collaborations with different →
Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9493148161, English, 260 pages, 2019, The Netherlands
Despite the fact that this book is extremely contemporary, it seems to emerge from the best traditions of 1970s-1980s counterculture. The author has a diversified background →
Vinyl 12″ – Slimvolume
This vinyl production references modernist experimentalism and is largely influenced by the tradition of spoken word and sound poetry. The tracks are interdisciplinary and proto-multimedia art forms, here developed by artists such as Martha Rosler, Ed →
