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.
Neural 57, Propaganda mon amour (co-edited with Andrea Natella). Subscribe now!
Issue #57, Summer 2017 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD + 64 pages booklet – Swarming
Eric La Casa’s latest release is a praise to the beauty and the sound charm of his beloved city, Paris. Paris Quotidien is produced by Swarming, a label founded in 2009 by →
There is no software, at least not here for us to see. Instead we encounter an infrastructure, a system, tethered together with motors, string and elastic, set in motion by chance, generated by the naturally occurring ambient radiation of our →
Sternberg Press, ISBN-13: 978-3956791727, English, 224 pages, 2016, Germany
This is a research project and a case study focused on illustrating “behavioural objects” in art and design. Attempting to precisely define behavioural objects is a hard task. So the authors →
LP + 29 pages booklet – Cejero
On small differences in Sensation by Eric Frye gets gently and stubbornly more impressive after the listening as the auditory and space contexts are taken into account. This almost too precisely highlights the →
The correlation between sound and architecture has been frequently articulated on space as the primary medium through which sound and structures can be expressed. Rarely, instead, have specific architectural principles been applied to sound, applying this kind of transdisciplinarity to →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822362920, English, 256 pages, 2016, USA
Digital apparatuses have induced, over time, a relationship which can be seen as very close to pure ‘devotion’. We care about the mesmerising rituals they fill our life with, but →
CD – Denovali
Behind the moniker of Ensemble Economique there is the Californian Brian Pyle and soon our memory goes to his project Starving Weirdos, featuring Merrick McKinlay. He is a very prolific artist: his career started already more →
Victory over the Sun is an ongoing project (started in 2015) designed by the artist Elisa Balmaceda (developed in collaboration with Celeste Rojas and Francisca Gacitua) within the “Electric Fields” series. The title is a direct reference to the Russian →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501327605, English, 198 pages, 2017, UK
Reversing the role of specialised technologies from tools to agents is an approach shared by inventors from the past, artists of all times, and contemporary experimental makers. Cathy van Eck is →
CD – Crónica
The connections between the radio-drama and the experimental music should be an object of study. Some mature reader may remember the strong relationship between these fields, especially during this age where the offline fetishism re-activates forgotten or →
Digital principles are “reductive” in their own essence, as they’re committed to the unavoidable task of quantifying any type of information into numbers. This methodology is constantly and considerably applied to the majority of productions and transmissions of human-managed sound on →
Kerber Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3735602213, English, German, 304 pages, 2016, Austria
Leitner’s artworks have extensively investigated the ability to acoustically experience space in strict relation with our own physicality. Defined as “sound-space sculptures” they have involved the viewer in intimate and →
LP – Drone Records
With a drone-experimental attitude the nomen omen series of the German label Drone Records is its fifth release: a vinyl featuring on the A side “Gjallarbru” a track by Gydja, followed by “Furnace” and “The Last →
