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.
“A Woman with the Technology” by Ziyang Wu is a complex process focused on AI and the so-called ‘filter bubble’. It starts by selecting a series of keywords close to the artists’ focus. His daily activity is then recorded and →
CD – Denovali
We can find different influences in The Dusk Loom by Petrels, aka Oliver Barret, whose previous 2016 album was also released by Denovali. The elliptical weaves of these ten tracks are evocative and inspired by both ancient →
3CD + booklet – Nakama
Can music, with its different language, engage with Buddhist philosophy? In New Rituals, Christian Meaas Svendsen proves this is possible, by exploring the relationship between form and freedom, modern Western culture and traditional Oriental culture. →
Vinyl – Aussenraum
Sinusoidal sounds, internal and external feedback, hits of piercing and infectious noise, and also repeated, sensitive and hissing drone deposits. This is the list of frequencies we get when we listen to Ganglions, an audio-project by Gaudenz →
CD – Fluid Audio
An album inspired by the psychology of Gestalt and by the topology of the colour blue is definitely unusual, despite the fact that other artists, musicians and philosophers have also been enchanted by the charm of →
Certainly one of the most interesting experimenter ever in writing with technologies, Mez Breeze has transversed online eras with remarkable practices. Her new work The V[R]erses is a microstory experienced through 3D rendered forms, which have text ‘nodes’ as →
Vinyl – Javier Lloret
Dating from 1985, WordNet is a semantic-lexical database for the English language, a hierarchical classification system describing the world, inspired by the theories of human semantic memory developed at the end of 1960s. In contrast to →
The abstraction imposed by the digital is mirrored by the previous abstractions created by humans, such as language, signs and, more generally, artificial representations. In Peter AC Nelson’s “The Data Stones”, this abstraction occurs at multiple levels. It overlaps with →
Cassette – Crónica
Even in Kruger National Park (South Africa), a huge subtropical area, crossed by many rivers and by the Tropic of Capricorn, hosting the provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga, it is possible to identify a sharp division between →
The dream of vocal assistants is speak to a machine whose behavior is indistinguishable from that of a human. But behind this dream lurks a global team at Amazon that reviews Alexa customers’ audio clips of all kinds of utterances. →
CD – Blank Forms
Maryanne Amacher, a pupil of Karlheinz Stockhausene and George Rochberg, created City Links: Buffalo in 1967, a 28 hour work where she uses 5 microphones in different parts of the city, transmitted in real time through →
Neural 65, Redirecting Networks + extra: Critical Atlas of Internet by Louise Drulhe. Subscribe now!
Issue #65, Winter 2020 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! The extra / artist intervention, exclusive for subscribers (Critical Atlas of Internet by Louise Drulhe) is already →
Neural #65 extra is an intervention by artists Louise Drulhe in the form of a booklet and a critical text (“Beyond Lines and Nodes”) by Kristoffer Gansing (ex artistic director of Transmediale).
In the words of Druhle:
“Through a →
Spector Books / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, ISBN-13: 978-3959053501, German, 146 pages, 2019, Germany
The multiple artistic endeavours of Carsten Nicolai have been acknowledged in numerous exhibitions and performances all over the world. Parallax Symmetry is a →
