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.
Marta de Menezes has a long record of daring bio-art, in some parts deeply questioning our concept of identity. In her “Anti-Marta” she has performed a skin transplant between her and her partner Luis, using an autologous graft as control. →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN-13: 978-3775744539, English, 224 pages, 2018, Germany
The complexity and the multi-disciplinarity of the Anthropocene are among the main causes of its still weak cultural and political impact, contrasting an already slightly devastating →
CD + book – Aagoo
After the audio-video bender happened in between the end of 90s and the first two decades of the new millennium to many contemporary composers, mostly belonging to the most tendentious and conceptual experimental scene, it’s →
The visualisation of data and processes is usually associated with the clarifying of concepts, enhancing crucial parts. And we praise both the computational power of our machines, and their hardware facilities including the connection, the hi-res displays, or the anthropomorphic →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517903077, English, 192 pages, 2018, USA
What does Facebook, the social medium with the largest number of users in the world, fear? Mainly one thing: the “mass exodus” from its platform, →
CD – Kvitnu
At first listening, synthetic repetitions and ritual atmospheres, a bit dark and churchy, welcome us, and later gradually become more spatial, vibrating and cosmic. A continuous tremor, as though it was the result of a delirious and →
How can robots critically assist painting (even unaware)? “alone together” by Addie Wagenknecht is a series of “mechanically assisted paintings”. A custom algorithm-led and modified iRobot Roomba paints with a blue colour on a canvas. By its own nature it →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1-5179-0059-5, English, 472 pages, 2018, USA
Our senses have been through the most drastic redefinition of their functioning since the introduction of electricity. Touch, indeed, has an →
CD – MICL
When we talk about Žibuoklė Martinaitytė, we immediately refer to a classic music universe, highly emotional and tied to an inner space full of shades and tensions, floating between tradition and modernity, daily life and physical places, →
LP – Lithuanian Music Information and Publishing Centre
The album presents two parts on the two different sides, each divided into 4 tracks, all about 5-6 minutes long. The listening starts with the A side, that includes the productions of →
CD – Touch
We have already mentioned the artist, composer and researcher Yann Novak, who in the past released works with different labels such as Murmur, Hibernate, Estuary, his Dragon’s Eye Recordings, Infrequency, Line and Farmacia901. Now it’s the turn →
Bouncing balls provide an endless supply of fun and learning both within games of physical dexterity and through the study of elementary physics. But the capacity to either intuitively or mathematically predict the future trajectory of a spherical object is →
LP – SVS
This release is produced by SVS, a label found in 2013 by Benedikt Brachtel & Daniel Hermann-Collini, a project focused on artistic residences and on a platform created for the participants. Zoë McPherson, a half French →
“We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation… The hand is the cutting edge of the mind” affirmed Jacob Bronowski in his 1973 “The Ascent of Man”. Even if we’re convinced that →
