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.
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262029278, English, 352 pages, 2015, USA
Collecting essays about Burnham can be a hard task, as they are scattered across different archives. And if one succeeds, editing a consistent collection of his essays, avoiding repetitions and →
The history of mankind through the centuries has seen a succession of many eras, discoveries, successes and failures. The growth of the human race has always gone hand in hand with the growth of consumption, profits, communications, technology and science, →
CD – Entr’acte
Joseph Nechvatal is a post-conceptual artist and also an art theorist. He usually creates unusual paintings and computer animations with the recurring use of computer viruses designed for these purposes. The lyrics of Destroyer of Naivetés: Computer →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816699544, English, 632 pages, 2016, USA
The scope of the digital is aptly represented in the scope of the definition of “digital humanities”. Initially acknowledged to be an umbrella term, it is gradually becoming more →
For humans, the conquest of space began in 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched the artificial satellite Sputnik. Since then, more than 4,000 satellites and 500 astronauts have gone into space. Despite the very important scientific discoveries achieved, space →
10” vinyl + 2CD + book – Sussidiaria
Tinnitus is normally described as a ringing in the ear, but it may also sound like a pronounced grumble or a clicking, hiss or roaring. Many famous musicians ((Pete Townshend, Ludwig Van →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190234621, English, 232 pages, 2016, UK
Environmental sound can be defined as the sounds obtained from vibrations structuring a specific environmental context (a forest, an office) producing a psychoacoustic experience. Beyond the different methodologies – from →
Technology has educated human beings to incorporate new gestures into their communication. These may initially be perceived as strange but then become part of a contemporary universal language. Touch screens have taken this language to a whole new level, triggering →
CD – Denovali
The reactive flow of elements in Quintesence symbolises subconscious and psychic elements for Donoso, telling a story of how memory is often disorientated and fragmented. The piece was developed in a complex installation made in a →
Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin / Spector Books, ISBN: 978-3959050937, English, 388 pages, 2016, Germany
Co-curators Stephanie Hankey, Marek Tuszynski and Anselm Franke investigate and oppose the accumulation of data in this catalogue of the exhibition “Nervous Systems” at →
Eggsistential Angst is a work by Neil Mendoza, defined by the artist as “an investigation into balance and survival as an egg and a pendulum weave a never-ending dance”. In the installation, a large, metal pendulum hangs with its constant →
CD – 12k
This is the fourth full-length album in ten years for the Australians Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco, aka Solo Andata, an experimental combo that now returns to 12K after a first experience on Hefty Records and recent →
La Gaîté lyrique / Lienart, ISBN-13: 978-2359061659, French, 144 pages, 2016, France
There seems to be a hidden relationship between moments in history when technology instigates historical changes and an upsurge of interest in the paranormal and the supernatural. One →
Giving over some fundamental use of our body to a machine can be an extreme gesture even if it is only temporary. And if this surrender also involves our ability to voluntarily communicate, then the gesture becomes even more extreme. →
