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 – Setola Di Maiale
Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V is presented in a elegant folding glazed paperboard with photos on both sides. The artwork is due to Erin McKinney. The project is an important addition to the →
Although it is a too trivial subject, we must admit that we are almost all affected by a more or less serious form of social addiction. The portability of the devices, the simplicity of the interfaces, the increasingly widespread connection →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1783209019, English, 188 pages, 2017, UK
In 2014 the seminal “Nanoart: The Immateriality of Art” book was published, investigating the connections among artworks using physics at nanoscale to question our senses and →
CD – Om Kult
When some sounds clearly remind us of “psyco-magic enchantments and occult yoga instructions” and at the same time take inspiration from to practices of electronics and noisy esoteric subgenres, it’s impossible not to think to William →
Lost and found. Or lost forever. The feeling of having physically encountered an entity and then being sure we won’t meet it anymore. We have it for objects, and especially for digital content, lost in the abyss of our gigabyte →
Christoph Merian Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3856168674, German, English, 108 pages, 2018, USA
There’s an unsolved dilemma among art historians: is there a sense in looking for connections among artists living in the same country, and especially →
CD – XI Records
From the first two compositions, “G” and “note, rest”, lasting five and seven minutes, we notice some timbre and microtonal differences. The protagonist of the tracks is the bassoon, empowered by microphones used to give life →
Narciss is a piece of software made with basic artificial intelligence techniques built to analyse itself. The installation, by Waltz Binaire Studio, consists of a computer equipped with a camera in front of a circular mirror. The algorithm translates the →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 979-1501305450, English, 272 pages, 2018, UK
The relationship between the body and the listening of sounds definitely can’t anymore be reduced simply to our ears. Holger Schulze in this book argues the extensions →
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 →
