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.
LP+ Flexi Records45t – WARM
WARM, a new French label of experimental music, debuts with Wave 91,6. This debut release also turns the spotlight on Julien Mérieau, aka Quartz Locked, a Nantes musician who is inspired by the sound archive →
Moozak, Kazoom#006, 236 pages, 2015
There’s already a small tradition of artists printing computer code on paper to represent respective media. For example, Mishka Henner prints artists’ books with the jpg code of early twentieth-century rare photographs (_IMG01), while David →
The contemporary yin and yang of privacy and surveillance is full of conceptual grey areas, especially in relation to surveillance and the degree of agency or passivity a user can assume. Uneasiness (about being observed or observing something illegal) is →
60″ cassette – Helen Scarsdale Agency
Released under the insignia of the Helen Scarsdale Agency, this latest work by Radioson engages themes of global conspiracy implied in narratives such as those related to Area 51 or in reports on Roswell. →
Greyscale Press, ISBN-13: 978-2940561001, English, 140 pages, 2015, France
Greyscale Press’ Manuel Schmalstieg understands publishing after the Internet. Not only because its catalogue of books is full of critical texts originally available only online, but mainly because it applies skilled →
Disputes about global warming between different groups often come down to competing interpretations of data – to building evidence or dismissing it. Intellectual dispute sometimes hides that these are vital questions with very physical implications. Time and Tide Bell →
LP – Denovali
Light and shadow, a piano, attenuated percussion and a bass-viola. “There is a topos at the core of my works,” Thomas Köner says: “I travel around the world and record sounds and images, they are unique voices →
W. W. Norton & Company, ISBN-13: 978-0393244816, English, 400 pages, 2015, USA
One of the most striking paradoxes of our time resides in our smartphones. Our everyday use of these iconic and progressively factotum apparatuses records at various levels every →
Look around on a typical day at an exhibition of modern and contemporary art and you’ll probably find curious students in search of inspiration; professionals (who always seems to be doing something important); invigilators counting down the hours; loving couples →
3 CD box set – Sofa
Tempo is a very interesting 3-CD box set published by Sofa and recorded live during a 4-hour performance held at the Rothko Chapel in 2013. The jam was led by the improvisation trio Mural: →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262029520, English, 152 pages, 2015, USA
The archaeology of computer art has been investigated only recently. Maybe one of the reasons for this is because, the higher the technological distance, the deeper our understanding of the →
20 Oscillators in 20 Minutes is a performance by Darsha Hewitt, staged at the 2015 Chaos Computer Club’s Chaos Communication Congress. Hewitt builds twenty small electronic circuits with wires, chips, small components and nine-volt batteries in twenty minutes. The time →
CD – Farmacia901
From Farmacia901, Fabio Perletta’s label, comes the latest work by Richard Chartier, a sound/installation artist and graphic designer who needs no introduction. Chartier is the founder and head honcho of LINE Recordings. He acts on this occasion →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816694419, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
We can attempt a definition of “information overload” as a perceived disproportion between the quantification of the information we ingest and our capacity to metabolise it. Clearly this is not →
