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.
Christoph Merian Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3856169312, English, 192 pages, 2020, Switzerland
Technology’s influence on our emotions is a recurring topic in digital culture discourse, especially since we entered the era of the quantified self. In particular, →
There is growing criticism of the widespread application of machine-based recognition and data processing, especially those involving visual technologies. The inaccuracy, tolerated as a minority, is second only to the political consequences of the applied criteria. Francis Hunger & Flupke →
CD – Noton
This is the fourth and penultimate work Alva Noto released for the series Xerrox. The project began in 2007 and is based on the iterative reproduction and manipulation of digital samples, copying and then copying again. Unlike →
In Michael Sedbon’s “CMD”, two artificial ecosystems, made by sets of photosynthetic bacteria, share a light source, the access to which is granted through a ‘market’. A genetic algorithm optimises the market rules. Each bacterial colony can claim access to →
Hirmer Publishers, ISBN-13: 978-3777432045, German, 192 pages, 2019, Germany
Cao Fei is probably one of the most requested Chinese artists by US and EU art institutions. This can largely be attributed to a rare ability →
In the center of the installation “*(asterisk)” there is what looks like an apple. Stuck inside an armillary sphere, the apple rotates continuously at 360 °. Four cameras scan its surface and four monitors positioned around the gear show in →
Blank Forms Editions, ISSN: 2642-7052, English, 302 pages, 2019, USA
The 4th issue of Blank Forms’ journal serves its vocation to research and publish forgotten dynamics and connections in experimental music. The issue’s →
Nathalie Gebert’s “On Framing Textile Ambiguities” is an excellent work using textile as both medium and metaphor, and focusing on thread, for its “emancipatory potential”. It inevitably mentions the famous Jacquard loom, as an ancestor of computing systems, and associated →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1623564940, English, 200 pages, 2019, USA
The temporality of music is a core argument for the perception and awareness of time. Music is discernable through time and its perception can influence the →
“If only these walls could talk” we use to say when we are denied the acknowledgement of a situated past, and there’s nobody around who can support it. This concept seems admirably rendered by Nadav Assor in “Stone Tape”, a →
Spector Books OHG, ISBN-13: 978-3959053105, English, 784 pages, 2019, Germany
Drone images have rapidly introduced a substantial perspectival gap into our already overwhelmed visual faculties. This is the most spectacular change we have experienced →
If we were able to invisibly occupy a sculptural exhibition with our eyes closed, what kind of sounds would we hear and have resonate in our minds? Natalia Domínguez Rangel’s “Overlap” is an artwork that works to answer this question. →
Cassette – Crónica
Boa-Língua in Portuguese literally means “good tongue”. This expression is often used in contrast to “bad tongue” that is “small talk”. For his second album Siria used structures of his former work, Cuspo. She used them as →
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder, ISBN-13: 978-8409128617, English, 264 pages, 2019, Germany
It is perhaps surprising that experimental music labels have recently produced some of the most interesting experiments in print publishing. Maybe →
