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.
Re:Voir, Blu-Ray/DVD + book, English, 2019, France
Joost Rekveld is one of the few artists who seamlessly integrates various scientific fields in his film practice. This selection of his movies is meant to be his →
CD – Arteksounds
With a tremendous scenic impact modulated between extreme vocals, audio experimentation and performance art, Stephanie Pan presents Have Robot Dog, Will Travel. This project is also supported by Ensemble Klang at the Festival Dag in de Branding, →
The borders between stage, exhibition space and performative extended space have blurred in recent years, becoming increasingly liquid. The Norwegian art collective Verdensteatret has assembled an audiovisual performance that wholly proves this concept. In “HANNAH”, the whole space is conceived →
Springer, ISBN-13: 978-3319710389, English, 214 pages, 2019, Switzerland
One of the most fascinating promises of the early networked media was the possibility for collective, simultaneous collaboration by users in geographically discrete spaces. Something that →
CD + booklet – Aagoo
Performing under the moniker Piles are the percussionists and improvisers Guigou Chevenier, Anthony Laguerre and Michel Deltruc. The French musicians work between Nancy and Avignone in France and are now releasing the album Una Volta, →
Cameras, recognition software, walls, borders … we are growing more and more accustomed to sacrificing humanity and privacy in the name of some sort of promised security, or even for much less. The ideological and practical boundaries between what is →
Black Dog Press, ISBN-13: 978-1910433225, English, 192 pages, 2018, UK
The seminal “See Yourself Sensing: Redefining Human Perception”, in 2011 created waves in the design community. Illustrating cutting edge sensory-based projects developed over time, →
2CD – Sub Rosa
The people of Sub Rosa, the famous experimental label run by Guy Marc Hinant e Frédéric Walheer, have often given life to sensitive productions in between critical revivals and contemporaneity in the past. But their catalogue →
The sun has recently acquired a symbolic role as the frightening, inevitable, overheating agent in our challenging environmental future. Nicky Assmann’s “The Abysses of the Scorching Sun” is a kinetic installation with a light machine pointed towards the direction of →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089648891, English, 358 pages, 2018, The Netherlands
“Why the 1970s”? This central question relates to the radical and comparatively significant production of underground social movements and media in that particular →
CD – Chmafu Nocords
This interesting electroacoustic release includes three compositions by Katharina Klement from 2014-2015. The tracks accurately conform to the large and eclectic catalogue of Chmafu Nocords, a non-profit label that promotes experimental and anti-specialist approaches. All three →
Irene Posch and Ebru Kurbak are not new in interweaving media and textiles, creating original works that mix them for activist purposed (The Knitted Radio). Their “The Embroidered Computer” uses historic gold embroidery materials and specific knowledge in craft to →
Art Book Magazine, ISBN-13: 978-2821600959, English, 194 pages, 2018, France
In digital art, one of the first reference point is the (im)materiality of the subject with the many repercussions it has in its creation and design. This has led →
CD – Mikroton
Angélica Castelló and Jérôme Noetinger are not new names in the international experimental scenes. Castelló is a Mexican composer and sound artist, famous for her musical research on themes such as fragility, the world of dreams and →
