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.
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262039802, English, 464 pages, 2019, USA
Nam June Paik is back in the limelight, thanks to an important historical exhibition at Tate Modern (see the report in this issue). There has →
The unpredictable resurgence of vinyl has rekindled an interest in physical sonic structures. Gilles Azzaro’s “Macrogroove” realises the idea of a three-dimensional sonogram. It is a 3D printed ‘audio coding’, which is played by a laser beam, scanning the form →
Vinyl – Mego
Peter Rehberg, the owner and founder of the label Editions Mego, is behind the moniker Pita. Since the mid nineties he has been a prolific composer but he is more moderate in his solo releases producing only →
The Institute of Network Cultures, ISBN-13: 978-9492302298, English, 288 pages, 2018, India
This is the second volume of a very specific publication, meant both as research and art project. It is focused on the →
“Alienated Vision” by Hsin-Chien Huang includes a series of studies related to stereoscopic vision, based on a disjunction between the images aimed for the left and right eye. Their combination is necessary for our brain to perceive three-dimensional space. In →
LP – Sonic Pieces
On the perilous crest connecting the conceptual fields of the drone music, dark ambient, experimental and modern classical genres, Jakob Kirkegaard and We Like We – a collective composed of Josefine Opsahl, Katinka Fogh Vindelev, Katrine →
umland editions, ISBN-13: 978-9082649543, English, 196 pages, 2019, Belgium
The ‘space of sound’, or the place where sound is perceived, can be interpreted as a philosophical space. It is the internal space where sound is →
The possibilities to create objects with the digital, which are both familiar and alien, are infinite, because it can abstract any materiality into malleable information. “Void“ by Félix Luque, Damien Gernay and Iñigo Bilbao exquisitely demonstrates this point. It’s a →
CD – Denovali
Samuel van Dijk, aka Mohlao and VC-118A, returns with the moniker Multicast Dynamics and releases his fifth album with Denovali. From the first sequences, the environmental approach is clear. There is a recognition of some abstract sidereal →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262043052, English, 232 pages, 2019, USA
The determining power of hashtags has long been proven: the role of spontaneous acronyms in the past has more recently been taken over by hashtags. →
The space for politics has shrunk, either ’deported’ to social media and online spaces in general, self-ghettoized in homogeneous circles or lost in the crowd of leaders’ profiles, not to mention the pollution of human and bot paid troll armies. →
CD – Protagoniste
The clarinetists Xavier Charles and Jacques Di Donato had already worked together in the nineties, releasing also an album, “Du Slavon Glagol”, published in 1996 by Khôkhôt. Now they are back for Protagoniste with fourteen new compositions, →
Jap Sam Books, ISBN-13: 978-9492852144, English, 368 pages, 2019, The Netherland
The Netherlands have a specific history of media art, which is recounted in this perfectly laid out, full colour volume. Huisman and van →
With the recent surging of AI as an agent of change in creating realistic artefacts, the established art categories have started to be questioned (as everything else which can easily be falsified by software). The further steps of these processes →
