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 – R’COUP’D
Coming from R’COUP’D, the parent of the famous Ninja Tunes label, Inner Systems is the latest record by Prequel Tapes. The identity behind the moniker is not known but the music tells a story of an English →
Physical Editions, ISBN-13: 978-0692215739, English, 695 pages, 2015, USA
The spatial dimension of the digital world is a very abstract idea. Being conceptually bound to the lightness and invisibility of atoms, digital is an imploded dimension in terms of its →
Spector Books, ISBN-13: 978-3944669892, English/German, 558 pages, 2015, Germany
The voice is our primary communication “device” and musical instrument, a volatile but powerful medium of expression, that takes on plenty of different roles. It has been used in artworks (especially →
With the same graphic design of the original Ryanair website (if digital is infinitely duplicable, so is also corporate visual identity), RyanFair.org is a project announcing a special initiative by the biggest airline in Europe in the middle of refugee →
CD – Pingipung
This very interesting album for Pingipung Records boasts a repertoire of music and traditional compositions documented in recordings by Sven Kacirek, the well-known German drummer and percussionist. On this occasion he has recorded various musicians from the →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816695713, English, 256 pages, 2015, USA
Decades after McLuhan, we’re still naturally inclined to embrace technology as prosthetics, or something that expands our faculties in a wide range of practical and abstract abilities. But the →
Transparency has become a relevant and ambiguous value, on one side revealing the hidden complexity of machines we’re surrounded by, and on the other side directly exposing human bodies to surveillance and/or exhibitionism. This ambivalent nature of transparency is conceptually →
CD – Erstwhile
Experimental music is a context in which irony does not usually flourish – especially in public. Humour is rarely used as a catalyst for new ideas in the world of sound, although there have been some notable →
Routledge, ISBN-13: 978-0415500593, English, 192 pages, 2014, UK
The ability of digital information, especially when constantly in flux, to alter our perceptions is still to be acknowledged and properly studied, despite several decades of artworks using media to illustrate the →
Anthropologically we pay a lot of attention to voices, as they are crucial to recognise the presence of a fellow human. And “singing” is even more specific to human, from our perspective. But, especially with famous songs, we might remember →
Touch, # Folio 001, ISBN-13: 978-1874104018, English, 60 pages, 2015, UK
The inception of a new series (“Folio”) of hardcover books is a significant step for Touch, one of the most important “multi/media” UK music labels, with its more than →
University Of Chicago Press, ISBN-13: 978-0226002736, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Among the overlooked aspects of the “digitalisation of everything” is the perception of colours on screens, and how they are produced (or better, “performed”). In this thoroughgoing research project →
During a period of time thought to be between two and six million years man has slowly lost the long, thick fur that covered his body. As protection against the elements and indecency we have dressed ourselves in a variety →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262029582, English, 368 pages, 2015, USA
More so than now, there have been other times in history when humanity started to think less about the present and even less about the future, and looked for inspiration →
