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.
CD – Baskaru
The chimes of a bell ring out six times and after a pause resume more mighty and continuous. In the background you hear chirps, then in other gentle sequences are the sound of birds and muffled noises →
The MIT Press / Whitechapel, ISBN-13: 978-0262529341, English, 240 pages, 2016, UK
What is the main difference between a curator and an editor? Apparently it’s mostly attached to the mediums they use (the white box vs. the white page), →
According to studies done in the eighties, there could be a ‘sound’ correlation between increasing drought and the proliferation of wood-eating insects outbreaks on trees. A lack of water causes voids in the lymphatic vessels. Depending on the diameter of the →
Device – Physical Editions
Experiencing the sounds of 1-Bit Music is not a recent subject for Tristan Perich. Indeed, as early as 2004, the multi-media artist and composer implemented an electronic suite in five movements on a single microchip. As →
Amsterdam University Press, ISBN-13: 978-9089649492, English, 184 pages,2016, The Netherlands
Time and sound have an indissoluble relationship, one analysed in disciplines related to acoustics, music and media. Wolfgang Ernst has conceived a different approach to this relationship, with a few →
Dewi de Vree and Patrizia Ruthensteiner present a series of Magnetoceptia performances and installations. These are named after “magnetoception”, defined as the sense, or ability that enables an organism to “detect a magnetic field to perceive direction, altitude or location”, →
2CD – Dragon’s Eye
Just imagine a neutral space, such as a large room with a hole in its ceiling. The perimeter of this room is lined with benches that allow viewers to look at the sky as if it →
Palgrave Pivot, ISBN-13: 978-1137374844, English, 128 pages, 2016, UK
Corporate capitalism is hard to critique, but there are subtle narratives that can produce interesting effects once properly manoeuvred. In this book, Sarah Kember targets the enigmatic “i”, a terrifically effective concept →
Small failures are part of our quotidian existence, but when they happen in music, they immediately assume a different meaning. In his “Adeus” installation, Joao Costa uses two metal plates, one made out of brass, the made out of other →
CD – Room 40
Born in California in 1983, Pierce Warnecke worked for 10 years in France and then in Berlin, where some years ago he completed his Meisterschüler studies at Universität der Kunst. From there he moved to Spain, →
Hatje Cantz, ISBN: 978-3775741026, English, 352 pages, 2016, Germany
Thank goodness we still have major personal exhibitions that produce extensive monographs of relevant artists, without having to rely on publishers’ taste and economics alone. This thick luxurious ZKM catalogue of →
Neural 55, Inconvenient Utopias + extra: numbered and stamped AMT research group postcard.. Subscribe now!
Issue #55, Autumn 2016 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD – Atrakt Art
The sounds of the improvisational musical tradition in Eastern Europe are still very lively and it is common to encounter some of its interesting expressions, both in academic and experimental circles. Sometimes, however, these different musical →
