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.
Editions, ISBN: 978-3033060722, English, 244 pages, 2017, Germany
“How can words convey a sense of place?” This is a relevant question not only for our visually obsessed society in general, but for sound art in particular where textual →
CD – Sofa
The Sofa Music of Ingar Zach and Ivar Grydeland is a Norwegian experimental label active since the 2000’s, which over the years has produced some extreme projects with artists from different backgrounds. We remember the free forms →
The association between ‘blood’ and ‘life’ is an ancestral one. When blood is then displaced out of the body, it is then perceived as weakness and possible death, as life itself has been partially sucked out of the involved person. →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035262, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
The essential moment of transition between the mechanical and the media takes place rapidly with the pervasive use of electricity. Its impact on our perception of sounds, beyond →
12” vinyl, sleeve printed on polystyrene tracing paper – Vlek
The last work of Yann Leguay, Headcrash, comes to us under the form of a limited edition – only 300 copies – produced by Vlek Data, a Belgian label active →
The social perception of the internet has rapidly evolved, sporadically incorporating vivid fears about our devices’ invasion and the ways in which they might affect and infect human life. The technical level of these fears is ungraspable for the average →
Dog Section Press, ISBN-13: 978-0993543524, English, 130 pages, 2017, UK
Hogre’s subvertising work has recently populated London’s bus stops and billboards, with exquisite graphics and radical content. This is a full colour documentation, divided in sections by media and →
CD – Zarek
From Zarek, a German label which has reached its sixteenth release, here’s a dilated, flowing and elegiac composition by Perlonex, an electro-acoustic trio composed of Ignaz Schick, Joerg Maria Zeger and Burkhard Beins. Its recording has been →
Questioning our general fascination with automation, Attachment explores the lack of serendipitous communications that arises alongside the notion of automation and machine learning. Colombini, inspired by the machines of Swiss sculptor Tinguely, has created a machine that allows one to →
Editionmessner, ISSN 2509-6672, English, 94 pages, 2017, Germany
It’s a bit surprising to once again hear the prefix ‘cyber’, which was excessively used in the 90s to describe the transition from simple electronic to futuristic digital (maybe a →
Cassette – ACR
This latest performance by Ondrej Zajac, Slovakian experimenter, guitarist and free form musician living in Prague and founder of hecho honcho of Meteore (which is a personal handmade micro label), is an unconventional artwork mixing a red →
The passivity induced by politicians’ rhetoric has been gloriously celebrated from biology to art and mass media theory, but it has never been accredited as much as after the populist waves within politics which occurred in 2016. The pervasive disillusion →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0195374711, English, 264 pages, 2016, USA
The representation of the ‘listening experience’ in classic movies has always conflicted with the dominance of the visual and its compelling narrative. Apparently we tend to relegate sounds, music →
LP – Sounds Art Series/Gruenrekorder
Patrick McGinley, better known as Murmer in the enclave of experimental and sound-art, made the release of this album possible in harmony with Gruenrekorder and thanks to crowdfunding on Kickstarter, involving friends and a big →
