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.
Darkness is a prerogative of moments of rest, of places where intimacy is required; it is also synonymous with perdition, or worse, with the absence of hope, with emptiness, danger, or the unexplored. The bottom of the ocean is desperately →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-1478002925, English, 308 pages, 2018, USA
Different countercultural generations have different references, usually borrowed from what they have culturally available and accessible around them. The pre-digital ones could count on →
CD – Ici D’Ailleurs/Mind Travels
Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Ardecore) and Timothy Lewis, aka Thighpaulsandra (Coil) already worked together last year on December 2017, with Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness for Consouling Sounds. The same dark ambient sensitivity is in →
“We cannot talk about responsible data without talking about the moment when data becomes data”. This is the starting point of the research by Mimi Onuoha, an artist who explores the processes by which people are measured, abstracted, represented and →
Presses du Reel, ISBN-13: 978-2378960193, French, English, 304 pages, 2018, France
The French ‘Espace multimédia Gantner’ is one of the unsung heroic institutions caring about digital art. Their collection of both digital artworks and →
CD – Grappa
A small wireless box, easy to wear, that allows every singer-performer to act with no obstacles in the stage space and be able to process in real time the effects and the loops; this is the idea →
In front of 154/156 rue d’Aubervilliers in Paris, the artist Pascal Boyart has created a mural that represents a reinterpretation of the famous painting by Delacroix “La liberté guidant le peuple”. The architecture of the image faithfully reflects the original →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0815382416, English, 202 pages, 2018, UK
Annet Dekker is one of the major experts in the conservation of digital artworks, who in the recent years has produced a substantial body of work defining →
LP – Staalplaat
This album is a precious release, a document of the historical installations of the Staalplaat SoundSystem, a sound artists’ collective whose main members are Carlo Crovato, Radboud Mens, Jens Alexander Ewald and Geert-Jan Hobijn. The selected projects →
The tension of sound memories can be formidable when associated with events with dramatic political meaning. They stay in the collective memory, and can resurge if allowed to. Kinmen Island, is the closest Taiwanese island to mainland China (less than →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 13:978-1517901547, English, 336 pages, 2018, USA
The need to understand the internal mechanisms of the Internet has become as important as the need to understand TV as a system →
CD + book – Audiolab
Harkaitz Cano, Jose Luis Espejo, Yannick Dauby, Xabier Erkizia, Mikel R. Nieto, Luca Rullo, Alex Mendizabal and Asier Gogortza are the sound artists who summarized the work of two seminars which happened in 2008 and →
Putting the Pieces Back Together Again is another spectacular complex system built by Ralf Baecker to let us meditate “on self-organisation and scientific methodology”. It consists of 1250 stepper motors arranged in a large square grid. Each motor has a →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501333231, English, 288 pages, 2018, UK
Our visual memory has been under the public lens of science since neurology became a debated topic in popular media. Personal memory, and its importance for our →
