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: 978-0262039024, English, 200 pages, 2018, USA
As with other phenomena now implicated in our growing dependence on online media, the archiving of web data has become essential for addressing our recent →
CD – Coda
The project Early Modern Infrared by the Italian duo Dahaka is a stereo combination of modified recordings of a scanning infrared camera and fragmented early modern music taken from the period in which the subject paintings were →
In our globalised space and time, media rarely completely die, but has peaks of use, ages, is being dismissed, and then rediscovered and eventually used again, or reinvented. 8-bit aesthetics and technicality floats in some of these statuses, and occasionally →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517902735, English, 376 pages, 2019, USA
While overlooked by many, especially in academia, China is increasingly becoming a different planet, spinning at a different speed. Worse still, Western cultures →
3CD – Fylkingen
Åke Hodell was a Swedish composer, poet and author, whose personal history resembles that of the artist Joseph Beuys. While young, both men were victims of serious aviation war accidents, Hodell in 1941, Beuys in 1944. Hodell →
Raymond Scott was the first person to build an electronic sequencer, and his iconic Electronium machine, conceived in 1959, was his biggest project, able to cleverly generate music, to which he worked for 11 years, never finishing it. Yuri Suzuki, →
Anthology Editions, ISBN-13: 978-1944860127, English, 332 pages, 2018, UEA
Before the process of sampling and digitalisation revolutionised the music industry ‘Library Music’ was a particular system of music production for a strict elite of professionals →
12” – Le Cabanon
Opening with some nervous ticking and an #oriental song #playing in the background, the last work of Yvan Tekoutcheff, aka Yvanko, for Le Cabanon, reveals itself to be a delicate, sensitive and pointillist dissertation, one whose →
Alexander Schubert’s Control is an immersive installation using VR to challenge our participant in control, intimacy and perception. Participants share one floor of a building with performers who are controlled through cameras and monitors on another floor. The environment quickly →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089647528, English, 266 pages, 2018, The Netherlands
The inner force and speed of Futurism has produced waves propagating over the decades and through history. Cinema, especially, invented in its modern form →
CD – Denovali
Elektro Guzzi is a guitar, bass and drums trio consisting of Bernhard Breuer, Bernhard Hammer and Jakob Schneidewind. This music combo wants to go beyond the border between analog and digital and create a sort of live →
How we can detach from musical instruments and music in general the social and cultural background that is inevitably attached to them and to the composer, and make music, being potentially enjoyed by not only everybody but all species? The →
Jap Sam Books, ISBN: 978-9492852021, English, 265 pages, 20’18, The Netherlands
What is the limit to the documentation that can be provided with a music release? The different formats are usually confined to so-called ‘liner →
Alberto Novello has modified a Vectrex, a 1980s game console. In its current half analogue/half digital form (what he calls ”Celestial Harmonies”), it allows a user to draw with sound. With synaesthetic aspirations, the analogue monitor is artificially ’excited’ →
