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 – DenovaliRDTK is the alias of two good old friends, Ricardo Donoso and Thiago Kochenborger, who finally had the opportunity to work together for this album, produced by Denovali Records. Both natives of Brazil, long since moved on →
It is quite hard to be completely aware of our addiction to screens. Being increasingly exposed to the combination of specific sizes, light and colours has probably produced archetypes in our mind, which are easily triggered when a similar presence →
Harvard University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0674728943, English, 280 pages, 2018, USA
Over the years the encounter between software’s dynamic qualities and the visualisation of information has been nurtured by entities of different natures: commercial, technological, →
LP – aussenraum
The project Biblioteq Mdulair – yes, that’s the way it’s written – has a setting made from 15 analogue generators played by the Swiss Emma Souharce and Daniel Maszkowicz. The two conceptual experimenters are also focused on →
Alex Adriaansens was simply one of the best persons I’ve ever met among thousands.
Trough the foundation and development of V2_ he put Rotterdam on the map as one of the leading cities in new media art since the early →
Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / ICA London / Koenig Books, ISBN-13: 978-3960983620, English, 200 pages, 2018, Germany
Metahaven (Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden) has, over the years, almost literally ’augmented’ their trademark style of →
10” vinyl transparent – Tonometer
The project of Christian Skjødt was initially a sound installation made for an 18th century wine cellar in the Riga botanic garden. The author is inspired by the site-specific context and evokes all the energy →
In the “Data Shop” installation, lots of colored tin cans are placed on shelves, similar to those normally used in supermarkets, perfectly ordered by colour in columns, as if they were encased in a structured matrix. The graphics on the →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262037945, English, 248 pages, 2018, USA
Andersen and Pold have dedicated years to the study and analysis of computer interfaces, particularly through net art, software art and, more recently, the electronic →
CD – Sofa
Ingar Zachn is a Norwegian percussionist and the creative head of Sofa Records. In this release, Before Nightfall One, he worked together with two other expert musicians devoted to this special music, undoubtedly one of the most →
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 →
