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.
Cassette – Crónica
The Waste Land by Luca Forcucci has been issued in digital recording and audio cassette by Cronica Elettronica and has its origins in a 20 minute soundtrack for a documentary movie. The Italian-Swiss composer and sound artist →
Communications technology has accustomed us to rapid developments that seem to tend to accelerate further. The web first, telephony after, plus all the declinations and variations on the theme: streaming, chatting, blogging … and this is only talking about the →
Thames & Hudson, ISBN-13: 978-0500519288, English, 352 pages, 2017, UK
The immateriality and volatility of music has been progressively shaped in material forms since it became recordable and distributable. These forms have rapidly evolved, reflecting →
LP – Aposiopèse
Released on a vinyl divided into two 20 minutes parts,An Incomplete Yet Fixed Idea is the last work of Eamon Sprod, aka Tarab, an unconventional musician from Melbourne, familiar with field recordings, electronic frequencies, sound landscapes and →
Fedde ten Berge builds various experimental music instruments, combining recognisable forms and materials with sensor-driven behaviours. ”het Ei” (the Egg) has been developed in collaboration with the ceramic expert Frank van Os, and has the shape of an egg broken →
Wiley-Blackwell, ISBN-13: 978-1118475201, English, 632 pages, 2016, UK
After her own several updated editions of the anthological “Digital Art” (Thames and Hudson), Christiane Paul has edited another collection of texts aiming to define digital →
CD – Kota
For the catalogue of Kota Records, an album designed as a “musical maritime trip” is already on the shelves in the ambient, experimental and sound collage sections. It is divided into 4 compositions which are the fruit →
Floris Vanhoof ’s “Polyhedra” is a sound work that freely elaborates on a device we consider to have a quite standard shape and function: the speaker. Forgetting the functional black parallelepiped with rounded holes for the speaker(s) he has created →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816696086, English, 232 pages, 2017, USA
The social impact of violent videogames has historically been a quite popular issue, generating lively debates in the pyramidal world of mass media first, →
CD – Denovali
Mei Zhiyong & Dave Philips first met in Pechino in July 2014. The first couldn’t speak a word in English and the other couldn’t say a word in Chinese. The chance was a first tour together in →
With an exquisite corpus of work under his wing that in October 2017 earned him a MacArthur ‘Genius’ grant to pursue his work in ‘documenting the hidden operations of covert government projects,’ Trevor Paglen is an artist, writer, scuba diver, →
Mousse Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-8867492596, English, 80 pages, 2017, Italy
Tarek Atoui has become known for his intense live performances producing uniquely sophisticated electronics with a true physical involvement. In The Reverse Sessions, a project started →
CD – Denovali
In this second LP – his first one was Feed the Tape in 2016 and was released by Denovali – Hentschel puts aside a more experimental and purer approach to welcome pop influences and less persistent contemporary →
Delegating to machines is an escalating practice in Western social systems. Along this line new apps and autonomous systems, acting on our behalf, are progressively meant to control or manage non-trivial aspects of our lives, including the totemic Alexa, Siri, →
