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 – Helical
The idea of an orchestra made of automatized instruments is not new in the history of music and technology. It’s a connection that in the nineteenth century created a craftsmanship of high specialization, modeled according to the →
nai010, ISBN 978-9462087194, English, 320 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
“The infosphere is not homogeneous, but striated”. This is one of the challenging yet fact-based concepts formulated and illustrated in Datapolis. This book, which originated as →
Using Augmented Reality to make a political comment was not necessarily the first concern of artists, who may have missed an opportunity. J. R. Carpenter & Tomo Kihara have seized this opportunity with their work This is Not a Good →
CD – Crónica
Multiple feedback, layers of noise and found sounds undergo several treatments being modified by a series of stereo digital delay units whose parameters (delay time, reverse, freeze, etc.) are manipulated in real time through a low-frequency oscillator →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-1517912116, English, 280 pages, 2023, USA
Although we attach enormous importance to sight, as humans we are very limited, as we can perceive less than one per cent of the →
In her new project Terra Xenobiotica, artist Saša Spačal explores the life of soil in the surrounding area of the airports. The installation consists of two parts. The film Holding Patterns, written in collaboration with theorist Alison Sperling, describes a →
3CD Boxset + Booklet – 901 Editions
Imagine an apparently chaotic set with four improvisation musicians and tables piled high with mixers, effectors, steel containers, stringed instruments, and microphones of different types, together with various other objects from →
The Eriskay Connection, ISBN 978-9492051998, English, 108 pages, 2023, The Netherlands
This pocket-sized book, which was partly crowdfunded, is the documentation and analysis of a research process. Cornford (interviewed in Neural #72), during his time as →
LP – Prensa Manual
Diego Behncke sets up a complex grid of sets, choices, and musical actions with the use of the texts of Foirades/Fizzles, a collaboration between Samuel Beckett and Jasper Johns, that gave life to what is considered →
Memories are in a crisis with biological failures through a steep increase in Alzheimer cases, and the creation of fake memories elaborated by machines. In ReCollection Weidi Zhang was inspired by her grandmother’s memory regression due to dementia, and elaborated →
The furore for using prompts to generate images is primarily based on a fascination with the similarity to what we know and what fulfils our expectations (or often does not, or only partially). Prompt Portraits by Clara Boj and Diego →
CD – Mind Travels Series
It’s not the first time Robin Rimbaud, also known under the alias Scanner, carries some musical collaborations outside of the usual borders, for example the most recent and a bit ambient “South London Original” with →
Lothringer 13 Halle, English, German, 198 pages, 2023, Germany
Over the years, Rosa Menkman has developed a unique aesthetic and approach to images produced by machines and their hidden mechanisms. In her research project “im/possible →
Arthur Lucchesi’s RWM MK1 is an electronic synthesiser that captures radio signals and allows them to be processed and remixed in real time. The spectrum of the waves captured is greater than the classic AM/FM standard; the device is therefore →
