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.
CD – Gruen
Unter Grund was presented in 2014 in the context of the NOW/ Parallele Welten festival, in Zollverein, the world heritage site of the German Customs Union. That 26 channel sound installation is now condensed in field recordings →
Neural 53, Obfuscate or Die + extra USB drive by artist Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska containing The Pirate Book pdf and source materials. Subscribe now!
Issue #53, Winter 2016 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free →
Neural #53 extra is USB drive by artist Nicolas Maigret & Maria Roszkowska containing The Pirate Book pdf and source materials, produced by Aksioma (only for subscribers for the printed magazine).
As Maigret and Roszkowska explain:
“This work offers a →
Constant Verlag, ISBN: 978-9081145930, English, 360 pages, 2015, Brussels
Since the late nineties, Constant, the Brussels-based artist-run organisation, has been an ensign in the world of Free/Libre/Open Source Software, especially as FLOSS relates to design. Their commitment to support →
While the industry is building the commercial “Internet of Things,” embedding transmitters and tiny devices in objects of various shapes and sizes, other industrial objects are being produced, acquired and becoming obsolete. The perception of obsolescence is relatively subjective, but →
LP – Aussenraum
Similarly to the vicissitudes of terrorism and major international conspiracies, also disasters – especially nuclear as Chernobyl and Fukushima – trigger a kind of collective memory, of planetary unconscious and they create new narratives and feelings, often →
Palgrave Macmillan, ISBN: 978-0230242463, English, 200 pages, 2015, UK
Digital activism started simultaneously with the commercialisation of the Internet, embodying the desire to expand and materialise the promise of a horizontally democratic medium. Since then it has evolved in a →
Despite real time communication (in text, audio, pictures or video) the physical distance from a loved one is still deeply perceived by our bodies. The Space Between Us is a very simple but powerful conceptual app by David Horvitz that →
CD – Cronica Electronica
Roha is the first solo album by Andreas Trobollowitsch, ex member of the duo Nörz and Acker Velvet, a musician and Vienna-based composer, performer and sound artist that, in collaboration with David Schweighart, composed the soundtrack →
Lars Muller, ISBN: 978-3037784334, English, 112 pages, 2014,
Sensing the Future: Moholy-Nagy, Media and the Arts is a catalogue of an extremely well researched exhibition of the work of this famous Hungarian painter, photographer and Bauhaus school professor. Alongside a →
Audio recordings of a voice evoke a person and also the period when that person has that specific tone of voice. In our analogue past, tapes were the most popular repositories for voices, as they were personal and cheap media. →
DAT – BIN
There are only twenty-five copies of this project by Jonas Olesen. Built with a Function Generator and an analogue recorder Panasonic SV 3800 DAT it is the result of a fifteen-minute sound continuum using a physically corrupted →
Duke University Press, ISBN: 978-0822360612, English, 288 pages, 2015
Even if we consider “the voice” as a sound source, in an average personal imaginary ‘sound’ is something external, while “the voice” is something internal and intimate. If we add to →
The trajectory of Peter Sunde, from the glorious days of Piratbyrån (which he co-founded), complimented by then Brazilian president Lula, to his recent period in prison, is that of a coherent radical activist. His efforts to affirm the political and →
