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.
2CD – MICL
If such an eclectic character as the journalist, composer, collector and musician Frank J. Oteri is called by the Music Information Centre Lithuania (MICL) to compile a 21st century Lithuanian art music anthology, undoubtedly the result →
The complex bee ecosystem and its influence on others has been underlined by science, such as the threats caused by the urban pollution. “Intelligent Guerilla Beehive” is a beehive designed to allow bee colonies to survive in particularly compromised urban →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262034180, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
The history of I.T. beyond the Iron Curtain is slowly being written, one book at a time. This one attempts to answer to the question: →
LP – Unsounds
For years in Amsterdam, Anne La Berge is a recognized free-improvisation composer and flute player, open at the same time to other genres and styles, thanks to her constant activism in different academies, collectives and musical institutions. →
Getting in touch with the work of artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand requires a multidisciplinary point of view, an approach that goes beyond just looking. Observation is in fact only the starting point that they themselves describe as the →
Michigan Publishing Services, ISBN-13: 978-1607854234, English, 263 pages, 2017, USA
Historically eBay has been a difficult territory for net artists, despite it has represented the first real “e-commerce for everybody” platform. Apart from a →
CD – Crónica
Graeme Truslove from Glasgow, is in the spotlight for his Crónica Electrónica and his album Intuited Architectures, which is divided into six different mainly electronic and electroacoustic tracks. The limits and the fusion between these two different →
Calling emoji a medium doesn’t sound too exaggerated now. New emoji are decided by the Unicode Consortium, a group of hardware and software corporations and volunteers fond of software, encoding and linguistics, based in the Silicon Valley. They receive many →
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, →
