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.
Early electric radio and turntables with their recognizable aesthetics are like totemic symbols in our hyper-mediated present. But they also historically represent an intimate moment of listening, with some artificial light emitted through their structure. This modernist fascination is the →
3“ CDR – 1000füssler
An interesting abstract-experimental 3” CDR is released under the label 1000füssler. Yan Jun is a Beijing-based artist involved at various levels and in different areas of contemporary electronics, from improvisation to site-specific research, from field recordings →
University of Illinois Press, ISBN-13: 978-0252081019, English, 376 pages, 2015, USA
There’s a strategic value in documenting early electronic music, as it metaphorically dispersed the seeds of a true paradigm shift in music and aesthetics. This scene was sprouting in →
Paolo Cirio has researched different social systems in his artistic activity, always finding tactical methods to conceptually destabilize these through the use of contextualized and strategic technologies. In Obscurity (after Overexposed) he once more addresses a facial recognition system, but →
CD – mAtter
This is such a splendid, elegiac album that the title Six Pieces For Guitar seems a little modest and simplistic. This album is released by Matter, a well-know Japanese independent label founded and curated by Yukitomo Hamasaki. →
RIXC, LiepU MPLab, ISBN-13: 978-9934843433, English, 296 pages, 2015, Latvia
“Data Drift” is both formally issue #14 of the Journal of Acoustic Space and also a selection of papers presented in the 2013 edition of the Media Art Histories conference, →
Google Poetics, or the art of the “autocomplete” has become a genre, as can be observed in works such as “Autocompleteme” by Jérôme Saint Clair and Benjamin Gaulon, or “Google Poems” by Sampsa Nuotio. Some of their strength is in →
CD – Von Archives
From Von Archives, an Italian label interested in the intersection of the visual and sonic arts, comes a classic work by Phill Niblock, a well-know minimalist composer, filmmaker, videographer and the director of Experimental Intermedia, a →
Fluctuating Images, ISBN 978-3000510724, English, 152 pages, 2015, Germany
Five years after the influential book Audio.Visual: On Visual and Related Media, Cornelia Lund has co-edited a new book on the same topic, this time with Ana Carvalho. Officially instigated to →
Take no Hikui-Ki no Take wa Hikui is a work by Muku Kobayashi, composed by cinematic sound machines. Even if the first reference to pop up in the mind might be Russolo’s famous “intonarumori,” these wood-based constructions are substantially different. →
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. →
