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.
2 x Vinyl – Counter Audition
This elegant, milky white vinyl box by a new label in Cambridge, Counter Audition, includes two wonderful 12 inch vinyl records. A digital edition edited by Line from Los Angeles is also attached. After →
10CD Box – Reiger Records Reeks
Here more than 10 hours of sound loops are presented in an elegant 10 CD box. This is Scanning by Roland Kayn. The work was entirely remastered by Jim O’Rourke, always a huge fan →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262042857, English, 432 pages, 2019, USA
Since the eighties (and the false prediction of full Artificial Intellifence by the end of nineties), the dream of AI has been grounded on →
2×12″ – Makiphon
awholerunboom is the debut album of MME dUO, namely Patricia Koellges and Tamara Lorenz, on Makiphon, an experimental label from Cologne Koellges run with Andreas Oskar Hirsch. The couple provides a passionate sound collage, whose matrix is →
The San Francisco’s Millennium Tower high-rise has sunk in the past decade by about 45 cm, and tilted by about 35 cm. This data is used by Postcommodity (Cristóbal Martínez and Kade L. Twist) to compose a piece reflecting on →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501347764, English, 168 pages, 2018, USA
In the struggle to find adequate definitions for the rapidly evolving forms of art made with technology, there has been a proliferation of compound words, in →
Vinyl – Weather
The name of the duo doesn’t refer to the track’s duration. 11 is the moniker of Jiyeon Kim, a sound artist and pianist collaborating here with the drummer Sangyong Min, another talented musician. The sounds of Snow →
The use of cinematic machines, or at best, robots, during live performances, has been developed by a few artists in Canada (take Nicolas Bernier, for example) unofficially defining a specific aesthetics and practice. The Ultravioletto group is an Italian collective, →
Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9493148031, English, 308 pages, 2018, The Netherlands
The historically normative power of maps and diagrams is examined with increasing frequency. This has occurred on one hand with the democratisation of GIS tools through →
Vinyl – Not On Label
It gradually grows up, like a sizzle, it seems there are some field recordings of natural sources, maybe bats, or rodents, or crows, and there are also tweets, cracklings, buzzes and clicks, followed by a →
“Respire” is an artwork realised by Kıvanç Tatar, Mirjana Prpa, and Philippe Pasquier belonging to the restricted amount of artworks in VR which are not focused on the perception (and often spectacle) of the virtual world, but rather on the →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0815374916, English, 246 pages, 2019, UK
Art Hack Practice answers a call for a critical perspective on the maker movement. This successful edition, edited by Bradbury and O’Hara, brings together a small but →
CD – Fylkingen
Moscow to Vladivostok by train is quite a long journey, more than 9000 kilometers to be precise. The Trans-Siberian is the railway connecting the two cities. Susanne Skog could have surprised us with more variegated and adventurous →
If the digital economy is now based on the abstraction of the shop into coding and interfacing its space on a screen, its epitome is the boundless Amazon experience. In “The Hidden Life of an Amazon User” Joana Moll ‘declassifies’ →
