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.
cassette – Crónica
For the lovers of contemporary experimentations (with obvious reference to avant-garde music of the second half of 20th century), the name of Pauline Oliveros is a key figure, not only for the unconventional use of her instrument, →
The dream of entering a symbolic dialogue with an animal species is probably as old as language. We pretend to “talk” to animals, and to get answers. When it comes to non-anthropomorphic species, the process is even trickier and leaves →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038904, English, 288 pages, 2018, USA
We might attempt to place Spotify historically as the most recent milestone in the universal digitalisation of music after Napster, iTunes and the iPod/iPhone. But →
LP – Gruenrekorder
With reference to retrofuture aesthetics, we need to mention Sounds of the Projection Box, an act of reverence to the vintage technology from Michael Lightborne, an artist and Associate Professor in the Department of Film and Television →
Neural #61 extra is an intervention by artist Jane Birkin. Her ’#officetruism’ is made of a set of ten coloured different postcards with statements about ‘office culture’. A page on Neural #61 shows the postcards juxtaposed, but in grey →
Neural 61, Speculative Pink + extra: #officetruism by Jane Birkin. Subscribe now!
Issue #61, Autumn 2018 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: #officetruism by Jane Birkin.
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Lauren McCarthy and Kyle McDonald’s “Man/Woman in the Middle” is an artwork applying the computer security “man in the middle attack” (an agent altering the communication between two entities), to their own relationship. They set up a server intercepting their →
Strange Attractor Press, ISBN-13: 978-1907222665, English, 264 pages, 2018, UK
There seems to be a consistent interest over the last decade in “hauntology” (as Derrida called it) and media over time, periodically re-emerging in art: →
CD – Opa Loka
Bart van Dongen & Richard van Kruysdijk go beyond the specific tradition of the prepared piano. In this coherent and very musical partnership they use the most classical instrument, but they hybridize the piano with several →
Soundwalk is a term defining the act of walking while focusing on listening to the surrounding environment. Nao Tokui’s “Imaginary Soundwalk” is an installation where the viewer can freely use Google Street View while an AI system is playing sounds →
Riverside Architectural Press, ISBN-13: 978-1988366098, English, 433 pages, 2018, UK
This anthology of papers revolves around the relationship between the philosophical concept of ’techné’ (“the principles or methods employed in making something or attaining →
CD – Tzadik
Okkyung Lee is an improvisational-style, South Korean, cello player. This eclectic artist moved, in 2000, to New York, and since then has started to work following a lot of inspirations, both solo and in partnerships with other →
At the base of every study on the development of Artificial Intelligence there is always a strong research around those who have little that is artificial… the human being. The human being and his senses that the AI try to →
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN-13: 978-0997874426, English, 144 pages, 2019, Germany
One of the characteristics of experimental music and even more of sound art, is that they have allowed musicians to permeate their work with specific →
