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.
Index, Index 046, German, 2016, Austria
Observing other people staring at their smartphone screen for hours, we’d wonder what should represent a similar cultural endeavour to what video art represented in the seventies for television? If →
CD – Gruenrekorder
Marc Namblard is no stranger to audio-naturalistic approaches – we could remember his previous release on labels like Nashvert, Ouïe-Dire e Kalerne – and in fact even to the exploration of open-air spaces in French Guiana, which →
Bone-conducted sound, or sound that can be heard because the vibrations travel to the ear not through air but through the respective vibrations of the bones of the skull, has been experimented with in hearing aids since the 1920s, but →
Cassette – Crónica
The Australian Tarab and the Czechoslovak Artificial Memory Trace, aka Slavek Kwi, now based in Ireland, began by exchanging different contents: audio sources, resounding objects, single sculptures and small self-made gadgets. The starting point was a reciprocal →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822369400, English, 216 pages, 2017, USA
“Due to an intensification of electronic signals […] the perception of the other and its body is reshaped” affirms Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, and →
“Recruitment gone wrong” is a work by Thomson & Craighead, inspired by actual events which took place at the Wisconsin University in 2013. There a National Security Agency (NSA) recruitment drive was turned into a kind of public question time →
CD – 1703 Skivbolaget
In the last few years there seems to be a return to some free form and improvisation styles. The reasons are not clear, but the themes played in between the expressive freedom and the formal structures →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN-13: 978-3775743624, English, 112 pages, 2017, Germany
Instagram as a visual and social phenomenon, with its seven hundred million users worldwide, should be one of the favourite topics and virtual spaces for student →
CD – Doubtmusic
The album presents eight tracks recorded at GOK Sound in Tokyo under the supervision of DJ Sniff and Yuen Chee Wai. We can openly say that the artists involved in the project are the most interesting of →
There’s a whole thread in media art about defining a portrait not through a face, but intimate data univocally connected to the person. Since our bureaucratic identity is solely made of digital data, as is most of our mediated sociality, →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501304361, English, 176 pages, 2017, USA
The ’exhibition’ environment (the white cube), assumed as the universal art container, has been conceived and developed to enhance the artwork presence, and the social encounter →
CD – Sub Rosa
Sub Rosa’s staff well knows how the field recording history is rich in its different approaches, and definitely in those experimental enclaves, and is aware of how such techniques have been developed starting from original scientific-documentary →
Fabien Léaustic’s “Monolithe” is a monolith hosting the biotope of a phytoplankton growing outside water and producing oxygen, which affects the visitor’s environment. It’s living artwork, with a recognisable symbolic form, open to interpretations, and with a structurally modified ecosystem, →
ECAL Editions, ISBN-13: 978-2970115748, English, 206 pages, 2017, Switzerland
Defining photography as a medium is not a simple task after the digitalisation of everything, since online it’s just endlessly produced and reproduced without any possible effective →
