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.
Artistic work addressing synaesthesia and the interrelation of the senses, starting from visual music, has often been based on the notion that light and sound are both vibratory phenomena, one mechanic and the other electromagnetic, and as such can be →
CD – Hideous Replica
Recorded in Berlin between 2013 and 2014, this album by Argentine musician Lucio Capece includes two extended compositions of approximately 26 and 21 minutes in which we recognise analogue synthesizers, oscillators, a ring modulator, an equaliser →
adocs publishing, ISBN: 9783943253092, English, 80 pages, 2014, Germany
As a result of the Global Prayers project on the manifestation of religion in urban spaces, sound artist Gilles Aubry has conducted extensive research into Christian charismatic churches in Kinshasa, (D.R. →
“Mirage” by Ralf Baecker is a complex project (in the true tradition of this artist) using optics and artificial intelligence to form a “projection apparatus.” It uses a ‘fluxgate magnetometer’ to detect the earth’s magnetic field, feeding it into a →
24xCD (box set) – Baskaru
Frank Rothkamm’s conceptual excursions are consistently surprising. Last time it was Reno that made us jump, a muzak album that certainly does not occupy first place in the German composer’s discography. Prior to that release →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 9780262027007, English, 312 pages, 2014, USA
Jon Ippolito is a key figure in the preservation of both (new) media and net art, involved in many of the early efforts to understand the technical problems associated with →
Is media art the retirement home for obsolete technologies? Liberated from the alienating effects of usefulness, our throwaway consumer electronic devices sometimes find a new life only after being replaced by a newer generation of gadgets. Stephen Cornford has been →
CD – Chmafu Nocords
The metaphor of the virus has marked the history of art and contemporary electronic music perhaps more than any other concept over the last fifty years. The seminal visions of William S. Burroughs and Laurie Anderson’s →
Crown, ISBN: 9780385347372, English, 304 pages, 2014, USA
Investigative journalism that draws on statistical analysis is often intriguing for its ability, when properly applied, to unveil ‘facts’ and, even more, ‘mechanisms’ which seem hidden in reality, and, generally speaking, provide →
Printsnap, created by the artist Michael Ciuffo, is a sort of instant camera. As a vintage Polaroid, it returns the pictures immediately, but the technology (and the costs) are totally different. The wooden body of the device encloses an ARM →
2LP + CD – Aposiopèse
Thomas Tilly arrives on Aposiopèse with a double vinyl lp and a CD containing source material. The work “approaches the forest as if were a city, a construct, an ensemble of strata and vertical heights →
International Neighborhood Verlag, ISBN: 9783944960012, German, English, French, 278 pages, 2014, Germany
Using print as a subversive gesture might seem tricky, as the immobility of the print medium doesn’t immediately lend itself to subversion. But one simple way to accomplish →
Les Presses Du Réel, Kunsthaus Langenthal, WallRiss, ISBN: 9783905817591, English, German, French, 152 pages, 2014, Switzerland
This is the rich trilingual (English, German and French) catalogue of the homonymous exhibition curated by Raffael Dörig which sprouts from the crucial moment →
booklet, USB Flash Drive – chdh.net
The packaging of this release immediately attracts our attention: a 16×29 cm hardcover in opaque black with the CHDH crew logo, a USB, and grey fold-out pages containing theoretical texts and explanatory diagrams. Égregore →
