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.
CD + booklet – Glacial Movements
The composer Fernando Corona, better known as Murcof, needs no further introduction after the outputs of the last decade. Released by the Roman label Glacial Movements, Lost in Time is a 2014 double vinyl →
A sign of the time is the decommissioning of systems that are considered near obsolete or too expensive or inconvenient to be maintained. Take for example the 4300 air raid sirens of the national warning system in the Netherlands, due →
Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1501331251, English, 316 pages, 2018, USA
The objectification of the voice as an incidental component of films, predominantly influenced by visuals, is an outdated enquiry. As an example, recent AI techniques, used in →
CD – Scuola Fuori Norma
Scuola Fuori Norma at Catania is a space dedicated to the study of a range of contemporary theoretical and practical subjects. Its experimental courses are often based on the study of the audio-video media. The →
There’s an underlying question in the media industry about the possible near future implementations of social media streams, or which kind of familiar and intimate physical form they might assume in the next years. Playing with nostalgia, temporal paradoxes and →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517902988, English, 234 pages, 2018, USA
Contemporary robots (and robotic devices like drones) are at the forefront of embodying the ’future’ we imagined a few decades ago. Simultaneously their social →
Neural 62, Spiked Pieces + extra: 25th anniversary cover sticker. Subscribe now!
Issue #62, Winter 2018 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Neural #62 extra is the only missed sticker in the centrefold. It is a miniature of the same issue’s cover (in a way manifesting its own presence, ‘closing the circle’), which is inherently announced in the previous box as →
LP – Urbsounds
The electronics of the Slovakian Michal Lichý, aka Urbanfailure, is roady, cybernetic and abstract. An artist working on the scene from the end of the nineties, he produces a rapid series of raw rhythms and multiform sequences, →
Among the possible embodiments of invisible digital processes, the mechanical is one of the most fascinating, reversing in a way the course of history. In “bit” Jonghong Park is representing a natural random process, using the principles of a Markov →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501312168, English, 216 pages, 2018, UK
Voegelin is a prolific author, and this book stems from her previous ‘Listening to Noise and Silence’ and ‘Sonic Possible Worlds’, both of which significantly contributed to the →
LP – Aussenraum
The Diatribes are a duo formed by Cyril Bondi and d’incise. Bondi is in charge of the rhythm section and plays the electric organ, while d’incise is focused on the electronic components such as sampling and melodic →
Liquid Loom by Cere Davis is an installation made of a few backlit LCD glass panes, all recycled from vintage ATM screens. Their ‘bare liquid filled glass’ is framed and available for exposure to electrostatic energy activated by a guided →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262038461, English, 416 pages, 2018, USA
The concept of ‘fake’ in art has been used as a ‘hallucinatory reality’ well before it was employed as a political weapon online. Conceptual art has →
