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.
Link Editions/La Panacée, ISBN-13: 978-1291988925, English, 184 pages, 2014, Italy
We can count on printed books almost indefinitely – a specific quality of the printed page to be contrasted with the instability of the online world. This book is edited →
The seamless integration between the real and the virtual is a still an unaccomplished goal: we can usually still distinguish artificial elements from real ones with ease. But when projections are involved the border between real and fictional becomes less →
Cassette – Helen Scarsdale Agency
Decidedly rough electroacoustic sequences are articulated by Richard Garet in 60′ Cassette, a release that The Helen Scarsdale Agency – a label representing the likes of Jim Haynes, Coelacanth, Stilluppsteypa and Sigtryggur Berg – →
Intellect Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-1841506630, English, 442 pages, 2014, UK
Video artists from the heroic years (mainly sixties and seventies) would nowadays be rightfully considered “makers.” Their various forms of “hacking” with analogue video apparatuses of all kinds, include bric-a-brac solutions, →
What do we lose with the universal adoption of digital as a sub-medium technology? If the vast majority of pictures we see are in (even slightly) lossy jpg and the absolute majority of music we hear is in (even slightly) →
LP – Nordic Sound Art / Kuno
The exhibition catalog for the Nordic Sound Art graduate show 2015 – supported by Kuno Publication Fund – is presented with a vinyl release representative of the work completed during the high-level sound →
I. B. Tauris, ISBN-13: 978-1784530358, English, 360 pages, 2014, UK
This anthology of texts finally fills one of the gaps in the (mostly western-oriented) analysis of artistic, social and political media practices. It took two years to finish, stemming from →
One interesting category that requires proper analysis is that of the media-art “remake”. How are examples proposed by the historical avant-garde recuperated by today’s practitioners, and when can concepts such as copy, remake, re-appropriation, interpretation or kitsch (in the sense →
LP – Gruenrekorder
R. Schwarz in The Scale of Things relies on evocative and enveloping patterns, with strong explorations of natural environments. The implications of the field recordings are given room to develop, but this is balanced with musicality and →
World Scientific Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-9814656856, English, 370 pages, English, Singapore
The relationship between science and art has never been univocally defined. On both sides there are different interpretations: on the artists’ side discussions surround which scientific disciplines are more suitable →
Everyone knows that plants grow towards light, but empirical studies on the effect of sound on plants have shown results that are less easily explained. Biophonic Garden by Sebastian Frisch presents an experiment in which a group of corn seedlings →
2LP – Shelter Press
A powerful selection by David Simple and Vincent Romagny, this double LP is a compilation of tracks by artists (Félicia Atkinson, bruant&spangaro), sound from films by artists (David Lamelas), sound poetry and performances (John Giorno, Karl →
Zero Books, ISBN-13: 978-1780992389, English, 271 pages, 2014, Turkey
We still have no comprehensive understanding of networks. Technological and economic impacts are reasonably well-documented but we are likely scratching the surface of social and political consequences. The author here embraces →
The social black hole where all the electronic waste is left to poison the environment is one of the most cowardly and paradoxical situations created by western industries. “Rare Earthenware” by Unknown Fields Division (in collaboration with Kevin Callaghan) is →
