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.
Combining the choreographic seduction of analogue machines, with the reassessing of a different function, “The Optical Sound Orchestra” by Mariska de Groot – who has long been fascinated by the possibilities of sound – is an exemplary performative media act, →
LP – Aussenraum
The Australian sound artist MP Hopkins currently lives and works on aboriginal land, in New South Wales, a coastal area that according to the maps shouldn’t be so far from Sydney. Matthew Philip, (MP is the →
Univ of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-1517902438, English, 235 pages, 2017, USA
Signs, meanings and cultural forms are stratified, embedded, set and exchanged in our urban spaces. Our perception of these spaces and their infrastructure, channelling signals →
Installations in the form of musical autonomous machines have the same hidden power to attract as autonomous creatures, as we attribute music and even more singing as an exclusive ability of sentient beings. The sounds associated with the movement reinforce →
Lp – Black Chrysalis
Dangerous Vision is produced by Black Chrysalis Archives, an independent label born in 2017 focusing on techno and is the last work of the Bolognese Matter, an alias of Fabrizio Matrone, also known as Heidseck. Always →
Baltan Laboratories, ISBN-13: 978-9081583039, English, 123 pages, 2017, The Netherlands
Economy, once a science for experts only, has become ubiquitous in the public debate after the toxic marriage between globalisation and the acceleration of its processes. →
A 1950s-style Bakelite telephone is the core of the installation by Stephanie Cormier and Dave Dyment for Untitled [Eavesdrop]. However, the strong retro aesthetic of the work conceals a conceptual technological short-circuit. Inside the device there is a smartphone that →
CD + booklet – RVNG Intl
Theory and poetic sound can combine with the goal of contemplating their seminal nucleus. In Anticlines, Lucrecia Dalt seems to marry this ambivalence, giving life to a sound space made of speculative synthesis and →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036757, English, 544 pages, 2017, USA
Let’s take the vast public attention on AI, and some of the hypothetical but popular consequences: machine awareness, autonomous artificial entities, and in the →
The crudeness of the presently available environmental data has strong symbolic value, and its possible representations should reinstate the awareness of the Global Warming threat, also when enhanced by challenging aesthetic positions. Chris Cheung (a.k.a. h0nh1m) works with audio-visual representation →
CD – Cellule 75
This is a new release by Marc Richte, aka Jehm Circs, better known as Black to Comm, whose second album is once again published in Hamburg with his home record company, Cellule 75. The work includes →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262036917, English, 240 pages, 2017, USA
Living in the post-digital also means that we actually can’t exclude the digital altogether anymore. But it doesn’t mean we should abstain from comparing →
Neural 60, Blockchain. The Trust Catalyst. + extra: The Maker’s Bill of Rights by Garnet Hertz. Subscribe now!
Issue #60, Summer 2018 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: The Maker’s Bill of Rights by →
Neural #60 extra is an intervention by Garnet Hertz. His ’The Maker’s Bill of Rights’ is a manifesto for Critical Makers condensed in a detachable sticker. It is completed (both theoretically and graphically) by his essay “We Need Something Better →
