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.
If we compare different representations of the Universe in different cultures at different moments in time, we confront very elaborated and imaginative systems, all trying to cope with an unknown structural dimension and scale. Nicolas Montgermont’s “Axis Mvndi“, cosmic radio →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13 978-0816683123, English, Spanish, 448 pages, 2018, USA
Beyond its obvious appeal to Science Fiction lovers and Science Fiction Studies, this book is a methodological investigation of tools and composition techniques →
2 × Vinyl, LP – NLS
From the first track, Ficciones by Paul Prudence reveals a hypnotic sense of estrangement and seduction, thanks to some cosmic and meditative sequences, with infinitesimal audio emergencies, field recordings and very elegant treatments of →
Learning from the digitised past and present, and then acting, somehow, in response. This seems to be the mantra of the current AI compulsion, crossing industrial and now cultural fields. In art it translates into ‘reading’ big chunks of art →
Christoph Verlag Merian, ISBN-13: 978-3856169060, English, German, 224 pages, 2019, Switzerland
Artificial Intelligence is now in the limelight of art practice as it has been conceptually situated as the most imaginative current technology. Much like Virtual →
CD – Touch
Bana Haffar was born in the 1980s in Saudi Arabia, but has lived in North Carolina since early childhood. After years of study as a classical violinist she switched to the electric bass and in 2014 to →
Can the sometimes catastrophic ‘unboxing’ of new technological products be considered ‘luddism’? Actually, it’s the opposite, as we can see in endless YouTube videos. Still the accidental destruction of an expensive smartphone generates chilling reactions in the audience, who are →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029667, English, 744 pages, 2019, USA
Originally meant for publication in 2015, this book, like most of the previously ZKM ‘branded’ MIT Press releases, is a dense tome. The 744-page text is an →
sonosheet, USB card + booklets – éditions ésam Caen / Cherbourg
On removing an elegant USB card with some beautiful prints on a pearl background from an envelope with the “THE LISTENER” printed on the seal, we transfer the 23 →
In dystopian times, with multiple perspectives of future catastrophes being announced every now and then, a question often arises: on what OS will we run our devices in the post-apocalypse? “Collapse OS” by Virgil Dupras seems to properly →
Alta Tecnología Andina, ISBN-13: ISBN: 978-6124793509, English, Spanish, 592 pages, 2018, Perù
This 600-page tome, including texts in both Spanish and English, is a historical account, compiled through multiple voices, of the Peruvian video →
LP – PAN
Are there worlds that are worthy of exploration beyond our own? In response to this enigmatic question, Jenna Sutela answers with some recordings from a hypothetical Martian language, visions of neural nets and synthetics and alien sounds. →
Although the Swiss landscapes are known throughout the world for their uncontaminated beauty, in reality they are supported by artificial infrastructures that have shaped these natural environments for decades: dams, tunnels, protection nets, irrigation systems, snow cannons and many other →
Društvo Galerija Boks / MG+MSUM / Projekt Atol, ISSN 2335-4232, English, 275 pages, 20’19, Slovenia
Printed publications are expanding their role as they develop and stabilise other cultural forms. This includes the ‘augmented catalogue’ →
