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.
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1623560942, English, 296 pages, 2014, USA
It’s interesting how temporary and highly focused exhibitions can materialise the research and curatorial ideas behind them into long standing books, in a way that crystallises their whole course. This is →
CD – 1000füssler
The first track of the latest release by Gregory Büttner for 1000füssler – Wenn uns jemand hört – sag – wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt – re-proposes a special composition for the eponymous show by Anja →
The MIT Press/Whitechapel Gallery, ISBN-13: 978-0262527194, English, 240 pages, 2015, USA
In the vast magmatic territory between science and media art, the concept of “system” occupies a strategic outpost, especially after the first developments of cybernetic studies. But this concept, →
Camera Restricta, by artist Philipp Schmitt, is a camera prototype that simplifies the search for new views of the most visited places. The entirely 3D-printed device consists of a machine that holds a smartphone equipped with an open-source app. After →
CD – LINE
Asmus Tietchens’ latest work is a subtle form of electronica that organises minimal audio emergencies and moments of silence alongside hissing, ringing and digital glitches. The dynamics are gentle but the sound remains intelligible, with feedback and →
Duke University Press, IISBN-13: 978-0822358893, English, 296 pages, 2015, USA
How we can define “sound” in the 21st century? Moreover, how can we define it indirectly through some of its key components? This book edited by David Novak (author of →
Artificial Killing Machine is an artwork by Jonathan Fletcher Moore and Fabio Pipar. It enumerates and transforms into deafening gunshot every new victim of US drone attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Forming a chandelier, 15 white (toy) guns are →
LP – Bowindo
Le Retour des Oiseaux is a project that brings together the musical wisdom of Alberto Novello, aka JesterN and Flavio Zanuttini. The piece is divided into five acts inspired by and dedicated to the French composer Olivier →
PML Books, ISBN-13: 978-1906496968, English, 188 pages, 2014, UK
Stemming from the Mute magazine crew, the Post-Media Lab at Leuphana University has become an exciting base for a number of artists and researchers. They have developed projects under the theoretical →
Exhibit No. 1: A large black rubber dinghy lying in the entrance festival centre hall like a stranded whale. The boat had been transported from the Greek island of Lesbos to become part of the festival exhibition. Before its last →
CD – Cronica
From the Portuguese label Cronica comes the latest work by Arturas Bumšteinas, Gamelan Descending a Staircase, a composition of over fifty minutes whose instrumental sound materials were recorded in summer 2013 during a research visit at the →
It happens to be outdoors, eyes are closed and ears listen to the sounds of nature. The wind moves through the trees, maybe a few animals, the passage of some sort of waterway and, above all, the flow of time. →
Near Future Laboratory, Volumique, ISBN-13: 978-295500709, English, 112 pages, 2014, USA
Plenty of extremely niche digital cultures are still to be recognised, not only by the mainstream, but also by the non-initiated. If there’s one prophecy from the golden beginnings →
CD – 12K
Here we find sweet and iterated melodies and rarefied envelopes of contemporary chamber music. Kenneth Kirschner is an artist well-known for his unusual elegance and the epic length of his compositions, which in this case extends beyond →
