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.
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262033930, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
Maybe it won’t be the “folk art of the future” as Brett Gaylor foresaw it, but remix is a socially accepted cultural paradigm and a popular practice. Gunkel wants to →
Deep Sweep is a low-cost aerospace probe that intercepts the transmission signals between Earth and the stratosphere, specialising in signals sent to satellites by drones and UAV. The project was conceived and designed by Julian Oliver, Bengt Sjölen and Danja →
12″ – Le Cabanon
Crypto Tropic comes from Le Cabanon Records, a label created in 2013 that promotes new sonic and graphic landscapes. There are ten tracks submitted and none of these exceeds six minutes, with several that are →
Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 978-1137437198, English, 320 pages, 2015, UK
The sudden rise of the term “postdigital” in recent digital humanities scholarship is maybe due to the need for a new word to describe the current, edgy human condition. The postdigital →
There seem to be a Canadian school of audiovisual performances involving electronic music, light and transparency, which maybe will be acknowledged in the future involving a few different artists. “Soft Revolvers” by Myriam Bleau seems to belong to this scene →
CD – Domizil
Commemorations are always complicated and the tenth anniversary of the Institute for Computer Music and Sound Technology at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) is no exception. This is an institution that brings together scientists and →
Norient Books, ISBN: 978-3952449608, English, German, French, Italian, pages 504, 2016, Bern
In order to grasp the most sensitive aspects of contemporary life we must relinquish simplicity. In working to apprehend an ever-changing and interdependent global landscape, a complex but →
There’s still a small percentage of people, especially in western culture, who might think that their public image is not dependent on their online presence, and there should be even fewer people thinking that social media are not a compelling →
CD – Two Acorns
Two reel-to-reel tape machines and two tape loops of keyboards with similar time structures but each with different overlapping chords. What flows from Akagi’s grooves are the very quietist sounds, beatific and enveloping to listen to. →
MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262029513, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
One of the major problems with perceiving digital content comes with negotiating the gap between the invisible virtual space and the physical infrastructures we move through. Think of the bewildering feeling →
We are immersed in invisible radio waves, almost all the time. This is a matter of fact in every city or town, with scientific studies divided on the possible physical consequences. We can trace the visualisation of electromagnetic waves to →
CD – Denovali
Today, digital communications, the proliferation of media, concerns for personal privacy, networked surveillance and the ability to hack networks, all generate particular previously unthinkable conjunctions in the relationship between individuals, institutions and communities. The topic of espionage →
University Of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816695522, English, 224 pages, 2015, USA
There is a never-ending tension between the ‘materiality’ of media and its endless (personal) proliferation, unresolved almost by definition. At the core of most media art preservation strategies, this →
Varvara Guljajeva & Mar Canet define their Data Drops as a “data sculpturing project”. It uses data from a survey about people’s emotions towards personal data being used by third parties and matches them to a colour according to Robert →
