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 + CDR – Verlag System
The fact that a legend of experimental music might resist to epochal changes, after repeated years of absence from the scene, is not everyone’s cup of tea and Maurizio Bianchi deserves to be acknowledged →
In the research for this project, David Vélez investigated some elements about the resonance of sounds through our bones. For example, in the early stages of our lives we hear our mother’s voice through the “mastoid bones of our skull, →
Phaidon Press, ISBN 978-1838664077, English, 296 pages, 2023, USA
The definition of Internet art was problematic from the very beginning, far beyond the used terminology(Internet, net, web, telematic, online, networked, etc.). The →
CD – Swarming
After the jihad attacks in November 2015, a large part of the spaces of the public buildings in Paris were reprojected with the addition of resistant metal bars at the entrances. This initiative was solving some practical →
Our increasing dependance from smartphones has begun to affect our circadian rhythms too, through the backlit screens and all the potentially incoming communication they represent, directly as notifications and indirectly as emails that make us switch them on even in →
LP – Gruenrekorder
These recordings from Mexican composer Angélica Castelló were originally developed in 2019 for an installation at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Oaxaca and are now released on the Gruenrekorder label. The tracks are relatively short with →
Routledge, ISBN 978-1003172789, English, 210 pages, 2022, UK
Andrés Burbano is undoubtedly one of the most important scholars in the field of Latin American media art and history and has dedicated many years to the research →
CD – Farpoint
“For intelligent machines to work, we must reduce the world into numerical data sets that support databases and algorithmic operations”, claims Arash Akbari. He expands on this by underlining that the physical world is often forgotten in →
One of the most frightening consequences of climate change is the drying up of freshwater supplies and the simultaneous increase in demand for freshwater. The kinetic sound sculpture hyd~ by Fabrizio Di Salvo is an all- black robotic creature based →
CD – Touch
One of the subgenres of field recording that is probably most appreciated by audiences not accustomed to the practice, is audio diaries, sound works where the artist’s experiences in specific places are documented. Audio diaries are a →
Verso, ISBN 978-1839764554, English, 236 pages, 2023, UK
There is an economic model that we see as irreversible, celebrated above all by American corporations: the ‘single-entrepreneur heroism’ with a technology company whose profits grow geometrically →
4CD – True Blanking
These four CDs are the result of three years of collaborative work between video artist Kjell Bjørgeengen and drummer Chris Cogburn. The duo decided to explore the differences between the resonance frequencies and harmonics of material →
Indonesian artist Abshar Platisza has created a series of works revolving around Biochar, an organically produced charcoal used to bind CO2 in the soil. In his installation Dalam Debu dan Abu (Within the Dust and Ashes), he made biochar from →
vinyl LP – Staalplaat
When we talk about simulation in the field of contemporary audio experimentation and the complex relationship between analogue and digital, it is usually more common for it to be within the context of digital technology being →
