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.
Stanford University Press, ISBN 978-1503635883, English, 184 pages, 2023, USA
The Arab uprisings of 2011 were a pivotal moment for the West to understand how enabling technologies can unite and help to be in a →
The institutional fraud of the carbon offset market is based on buying credits to offset the pollution and destruction of the environment just continuing to do so while someone else somewhere else namely working to offset it. The Offset project →
CD + ArtZine – GaSaG
If we don’t have in mind examples from the history of cinema where a soundtrack comes before of everything else – maybe such strategy is valid only in a special type of animation movies – →
V2_, ISBN 978-9082893564, English, 226 pages, 2022, The Netherlands
Becoming Geological is one of the various outcomes of a structured research project developed by Martin Howse during the first DAAR Alex Adriaansens Residency at →
Interface is a project by Jose Chavarría in which he has built transparent masks equipped with sensors and physical transducers to simulate three non-human senses in our face. The bat’s echolocation produces bouncing sound waves to sense proximity, the python’s →
LP – Persistence of Sound
After Cage, the awareness of our outside environment cannot be unbound from the integration between art and technology, in a link full of experiences and now enriched with the contributions of the 3-D electroacoustics →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262045193, English, 380 pages, 2022, USA
The arousal power of the voice has been used extensively in music of all genres. But is it possible to quantify and qualify this use →
Sound art is no stranger to the form of a sounding sculpture, because the materiality inherent in sound waves encourages us to think about an outstanding object that, having received the sound waves, provides a form of acoustics. Floris Vanhoof’s →
CD – Ash International
How to bring out in the music new possibilities to explore alternative realities, since they are difficult to imagine, if not under the perspective of a spatial and “not naturalistic” acoustics, whose sounds derive from some →
Semiotext(e), ISBN 978-1635901689, English, 216 pages, 2022, USA
How internet has reached the current status? To understand it beyond the vagueness of abstract global labels (like “Web3”), and to give context and history to the →
For many centuries hysteria (a term deriving from the Greek hysteron, uterus) was considered a pathology, found by medical and mental diagnosis, to which a vast number of female imbalances can be traced back; the scientific (or fake) assumption was →
2CD – Karlrecords
Dirk Dresselhaus, aka Schneider TM, greatly wanders between new sound forms, auteur pop, improvisative music and conceptual experimentation already from the mid-nineties, even before the transition to the digital was fully achieved in the production processes. Actually, →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262046602, English, 324 pages, 2022, USA
Unlike many books about our technological present, which focus on the emerging impact of very tangible technologies, Sensing Machines reveals the invisible ocean of sensors →
LP + CDR – Verlag System
The fact that a legend of experimental music might resist to epochal changes, after repeated years of absence from the scene, is not everyone’s cup of tea and Maurizio Bianchi deserves to be acknowledged →
