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.
Hatje Cantz, ISBN 978-3775750707, English, 112 pages, 2022, Germany
The aesthetics of server farms have been explored by artists since the 2010s as sites of monumental and hidden infrastructures. From Timo Arnall’s Internet machine, a →
There is a whole history of dancing as a competitive game, from the early ‘Dance Dance Revolution’ to the popular ‘Just Dance’, where a machine is quantifying and then evaluating players’ moves. The physical involvement of the player and the →
LP – Urbsounds
It’s the twentieth anniversary of this Bratislava DIY collective on Urbsounds, a label that has remained loyal to its punk roots – punk in the most political meaning of the word, reflecting the most desolate parts of →
Indiana University Press, ISBN 978-0253054494, English, 280 pages, 2022, USA
The mental space of video games is a specific one. It is a virtual world in which we immerse ourselves, participate in its narrative and →
Climate change is increasingly being studied through the lens of entropy. Entropy indicates a state of disorder that governs the exchange of energy between systems. For example, at room temperature, why does ice turn into water and then eventually air, →
7″ – Staalplaat
Lloyd Dunn has been releasing work under the alias Nula.cc since 2009. As an artist he combines multimedia with a ‘traditional’ field recordist approach, this makes sense when we consider his career more broadly. In the 80s →
Univ Of Minnesota Press, ISBN 978-151790218, English, 328 pages, 2022, USA
It has become increasingly difficult to define what a laboratory is as the term is applied to any concentrated set of activities in →
Les 1000 vies d’Isis is a series of photographic portraits of a woman, Isis. We see her in a driveway looking towards the sea, in her bed, in front of the mirror, waiting for someone in a café. A warm →
CD – Raster
The eleven compositions on this album were ‘programmed, engineered and mastered by an algorithm’ and arranged by Atom™, one of the many pseudonyms of the celebrated German composer, musician and electronic music producer Uwe Schmidt. Artificial Intelligence →
Neural 71, Strange Weathers (co-edited with Daphne Dragona, Jussi Parikka). Subscribe now!
Issue #71, Winter 2022 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Onassis Foundation, ISBN 978-6188536180, English, 536 pages, 2022, Greece
In the current boom of books on the impact of AI, led by the urgency to better understand a rapid and pervasive shift in culture and →
In the development of musical instruments today, traditional forms and systems are often combined with analogue or digital techniques, creating functional hybrids. Lyraei is a musical instrument of this kind by Mihalis Shammas. It is a chordophone with magnetic pulses →
Cassette – CCSS++
Diogo Tudela is a media artist and independent researcher whose practice is informed by speculative IT, mechatronics and science fiction. He teaches sound art and creative programming at School of Arts — UCP since 2019, →
transcript, ISBN 978-3837663303, English, 212 pages, 2022, Germany
In this dissertation project, Rémy Bocquillon attempts to establish ‘sonic sociology’, whereby sound is regarded as an instrument of sociology rather than its object. Bocquillon develops →
