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.
Collecting and visualizing data means quantifying and representing the sense of enumeration. In the project “Dear Data” infodesigners Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec have created a collection of hand-drawn infographics on postcards, sent weekly to each other between New York →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262028462, English, 320 pages, 2015, USA
Chris Salter (interviewed in Neural #50) is a one-of-a-kind researcher and artist. His artistic work focuses and challenges human perception in different critical ways, while in his theoretical research he →
CD – Klangbad
The duo consists of F.M. Einheit, the renowned percussionist and actor, and Hans Jochaim Irmler, keyboardist in the Krautrock group Faust. The pair collaborated between 2012 and 2015, meeting at Faust’s studio for eight jam sessions, each →
Be patient, the desert is coming. Every year, humanity loses about seven million hectares of fertile land due to the advancement of the desert areas of the world, a phenomenon known as desertification. The main causes, in addition to climate →
Neural 52, Complexity issue(s). Subscribe now!
Issue #52, Autumn 2015 ISSN: 2037-108X
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The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262028127, English, 304 pages, 2014, USA
One of the last bastions of independent media in USA, low-power FM (LPFM), has been regulated by law through the concession of frequencies, and was made finally available to citizens →
2CD – Sub Rosa
Jean-Luc Fafchamps is a pianist and composer who studied at the Conservatory in Mons and at the University of Leueven, as well as being a member of the Ictus Ensemble. In the past he has collaborated →
Aeolian instruments create an atmosphere that can be eerie, entrancing or foreboding, giving wind currents a resonant voice. Wind harps that appeared to be played by invisible spirits created the first ambient music. Singing kites have carried whistles and flutes →
Onomatopee, ISBN-13: 978-9491677229, English,, 270 pages, 2014, The Netherlands
Bureau d’Etudes’ maps have been recognised not only as fascinating artworks, but also as mirrors of power systems, and have been unveiled through a clever and self-aware use of networks. This →
2CD – Post Concrete
Revolutions Per Minute is a double CD published under the label Concrete Post. It is a near exhaustive survey on Chinese Sound Art drawn from the exhibition at Colgate University in Hamilton, New York. This exhibition →
What if we could see the world as through a camera obscura? We could certainly have a different visual perspective on it and therefore a different perception of space. “Pinhole Cinema” by the Japanese Fuwarilab offers a cheap method to →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN-13: 978-0816695935, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
When did “globalisation” truly start? Digging through history it would be easy to go back a few decades, as the internet was starting to become so pervasive. But exactly →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Coming out nine years after Grist (Ad Noiseam adn70, 2006), an album that gave rise to intense live shows and built a considerable fanbase for Drumcorps, Falling Forward does not disappoint, even if after all this →
Google Street View has slowly grown through the years towards its ambitious goal to become the “Eye of God” available on any connected screen. The pure illusion to see (and so for our primary senses to be) everywhere, accessing any →
