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.
LP – Le Cabanon
Written, produced and mixed in the Northeast of Madagascar by Clovis Lemée, a musician and co-director of Cabanon Records, aka Horla, this LP is a tribute to the savage nature, animism and mysterious essence of this →
UV Éditions, ISBN-13: 978-2956275329, French, 312 pages, 2019, France
There are very few radical and outstanding figures like Tetsuo Kogawa in media art. His work on radio as a liberating medium in unparalleled as →
Our fauna of digital devices is not only made of screens, but also of various kinds of sensors, which are scanning and digitising the reality in multiple concurrent ways. Julien Clauss’ “Ground Noise” is a situated media work. He has →
CD – Circum-Disc
The set Peter Orins organized for Happened By Accident is quite basic and lacks electronic instruments. In the seven compositions we can distinguish percussive elements, apart from other items such as bowls, wood and shells. You really →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190949990, English, 264 pages, 2019, UK
It’s been more than two decades since Erik Davis’ Techgnosis kindled a collective interest in the mystical impulses underpinning the rise of information technologies. Believing →
CD – 901 Editions
Rudolph Koenig, a physicist who mainly focused on acoustic phenomena, was a pioneer of research on the diffusion of sounds and frequencies. The German scientist got huge credit for the scientific equipment he designed, many of →
“Groovular Synthesis – the Edison Effect reVisited” by Paul DeMarinis and Jo Kazuhiro stems from the collective project “Life in the Groove” they conducted during the years 2018-19. There is a central text (“Ditties and Odes to T.A.Edison”), which is →
SD card + booklet – Artkillart
There are some sounds we are unable to hear, because they above or below the audible spectrum of the human ear or are masked by sounds occurring alongside them or just before. ‘Lossy’ Compression →
Urbanomic/Art Editions, ISBN-13 978-1916405219, English, 264 pages, 2019, UK
Unsound: Undead is an anthology from Steve Goodman (aka Kode 9) Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou. It deals with sound, ultrasound and infrasound (respectively sound →
CD – Crónica
Ekkert Nafn is the result of a collaboration between Francisco López & Miguel A. García, two well-recognized names in the contemporary sound world. To date, López has published almost 150 audio projects on many labels all over →
Contemporary life seems to be an endless game of data quantification, moving across different cultural domains. The former is an articulation of the digitalisation process, which feeds the current obsession with ‘machine learning’ strategies. The latter can spin these calculations →
Spector Books, ISBN-13:978-3959051897, English, 300 pages, 2019, Germany
This book documents Radio Revolten (translation: Radio Revolts), the international radio-art festival in Halle, Germany, which took place in October 2016. The festival invited more than 70 →
LP – Urbsounds Collective
Dead Janitor is the moniker hiding Brano Findrik, a Slovakian producer who here presents eleven tendentious compositions of dark contemporary IDM (intelligent dance music) for Urbsounds Collective. The tracks seem very harsh and suburban, but in →
Custom electronic music instruments have a tradition that largely stems from DIY techniques, taking a functional more than formal approach, with hardware components usually very visible in the final release. Love Hultén’s “Evoboxx” defies these expectations. Officially described as a →
