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.
DIY, English, 59 pages, 2017, USA
After his famous series of ‘Critical Making’ zines, Garnet Hertz has produced another publication about critical technologies, called ‘Disobedient Electronics’, in his trademarked sophisticated zine style. He’s back →
designed cover + download code – panke.gallery
Shush Tones’ package is a 12” traditional paperboard in a limited edition of 100 copies. It’s nothing really special at first sight, but actually inside the paper box there is a plexiglass square →
An unlit space is illuminated by a pataphysical construction composed of a circle of neon-lit liquid acrylic tubes. Electrical clicks pulse the neon illuminations on and off in precise synchronisation like a secret code of intercommunication. The contraption’s occluded transactions →
Valiz, ISBN-13: 978-9492095237, English, 208 pages, 2017, The Netherlands
“Authenticity?” is an anthology of texts challenging the concept of ‘original’ from some of the most engaging present discourses. As the editors remark “[…] in the post-digital context, →
CD – Aufabwegen
An interesting collaborative project comes at last, designed by Perletta himself, as an elegant coloured digipack. Asmus Tieschens is partner of Perletta the first experimenter from Roseto degli Abruzzi – now living in Berlin and owner of →
Since they decided to work together after leaving university in 1996, Japanese artists duo Sembo Kensuke and Yae Akaiwa, known best as exonemo, have quintessentially embodied the craft of traversing hybrid media practices, conceptually probing and pulling at dualistic boundaries, →
Liverpool University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0993248740, English, 344 pages, 2017, UK
For many an obscure and ungraspable technology, but still one of the most promising to have a very relevant impact on the real world (again), blockchain is often →
CD – Kvitnu
Transmutatsia is the latest work of Zavoloka, produced as usual by Kvitnu. It’s an industrial and noise sound tour, a six minute composition full of space atmospheres and dreamy digressions with tones now suggestive and praising, now →
The long-standing man/machine interface historical discourse is no longer frozen on the linguistic distance between the two elements since sensors and software have started to be more widely available. Now the aim is to be in synch, or even in →
When Trump Studies, as they inevitably will, become embedded in media/communications courses over the next year or two, one project most likely to be in the core curriculum is David Neeval’s “@burnedyourtweet.” He launched it anonymously in March this year, →
Raster-Noton, ASIN: 3981276035, English, 400 pages, 2017, Germany
The oldest digital culture institutions which are still active, are involved with different options to celebrate their multiple-decades anniversaries. One specific element is usually very present in all these →
2CD + 44 pages cover booklet – Unsounds
Subvoice is a collection of nine recent works by Yannis Kyriakides. He is a sound-artist and composer of contemporary classical music, who explores new forms and hybrids of media. Words and Song →
CD – Constellation
The Canadian sound artist Matthew Patton, aka Those Who Walk Away, has not chosen such a moniker at random. Moreover, considering the majestic and gloomy seriousness of the harmonies developed in this it is clear that it →
Developed by Marie Caye in collaboration with Arvid Jense and the farm Vair, “Pigstrument” is meant to be a musical instrument for pigs. It is shaped in a way that means it can roll around, allowing it to play to →
