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.
Looking at western news and commentaries, Beijing often looks like the Los Angeles depicted in Blade Runner, with an unbearably high level of pollution that has at times pushed authorities to forbid people from leaving their homes. The Chinese performance →
CD – Sacred Realism
A single recording of the violin glissando of Johnny Chang has been turned into a multi-track recording. Here one violin becomes sixteen. Peter Ablinger’s Augmented Study Serie is focused on “tension between redundancy of material and →
Routledge, ISBN: 978-1138021105, English, 752 pages, 2015, USA
With academic web repositories now flourishing, storing thousands of papers and providing readers with the ability to quickly search through them, one might wonder: what is the motivation to print a 750 →
North, South, West, East. A meter, a foot, a mile, an inch, a pixel. Much of our composure often results from certainties, superstructures, units of measurement, from the knowledge of space and time. But at other times it’s necessary to →
CD – Amorfon
We are at the extreme borders of experimental jazz and free form, where they collide with different musical wisdom and expertise. Jorge Queijo is a Portuguese drummer, Hiroki Chiba is a Japanese bassist and Yoshio Machida is →
Blurb, ISBN: 978-1320652773, English, 98 pages, 2015
What has been collectively defined in the past as “bio art” can be now divided into a series of different branches, involving different balances between art and science and different collateral disciplines. Resistant →
The power of representing reality given by smartphone cameras in our pockets is formidable; even considering only the sheer quantity of pictures we’re carrying with us (usually no less than a few thousands) we can clearly see how it’s inevitably →
CD – Aagoo
Diego Martinez, aka Lumen Lab, began his musical career in 2009 at the age of fifteen, using drum machines, secondhand synths and any electronic device he could lay his hands on. His post-industrial approach, infused by noise →
Gestalten, ISBN-13: 978-3899556452, English, 240 pages, 2016, Germany
“Photoviz” is a neologism describing classic photographs whose content can also be interpreted as data visualisation (“dataviz”). This homonymous book is edited by Nicholas Felton and is a visually amazing collection, giving →
The loss of reference points in the open sea affects our equilibrium, both physically and psychologically. Seasickness is a kind of vertigo, triggered by the feeling of instability in both our body and the liquid environment we are in. Commissioned →
CD 8-page booklet – ARTEksounds
Katarzyna Glowicka ventures into a modern interpretation of Shakespeare’s sonnets, for many one of the highest expressions of love in all of literature, but for others a controversial work, who argue that these texts are →
Meson press eG, ISBN-13: 978-3957960306, English, 276 pages, 2015, USA
In the line of seminal exhibitions that have formulated early visions of new media and art, Les Immatériaux has a special place. Curated in 1985 by Jean-François Lyotard with the help →
We live in a dark age. While this phrase emerges from the middle ages … any excuse is good. Culture? Dark age. Policy? Dark age. Humanitarian rights? Dark age. London, one of the most popular European capitals, wanted to start →
CD – 12K
Federico Durand is an Argentinian composer who is well known for a series of refined and delicate releases on labels such as Spekk, Own, and Desire Path. The seminal idea of A Través Del Espejo dates to →
