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.
unsounds, DVD, 29U
The use of text in short films is seen in many genres, including silent movies (obviously), experimental cinema and visual poetry. Kyriakides’ approach to this field has been described as “music text films”, which comprise of bold →
CD – Herbal
This release features Klaus Janek playing a digitally-processed double bass and Claudio Rocchetti manipulating field recordings and calibrated modulating environmental feedback. Hosting sounds by Li Zeng Hui, Yan Jun, Stephen Roach, Feng Hao, Liu Xin Yu, Torturing →
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN: 978-0982743911, English, 176 pages, 2013, Germany
The unavailability of important texts in English is often underestimated and unrecognised in the mantra of the all-available/digitise everything online giants. Effective translation software seems to be another major technology →
USB Flash Drive – Computer Club
This is the second release on Computer Club by Yaxu – the solo project of Alex Mclean, algorave pioneer and member of the seminal live coding band Slub. It comes in an immediately striking →
Spatial sound diffusion is usually associated with electronic and electroacoustic music. Over the course of the 20th century a number of institutions were created that allowed pioneering composers to experiment with spatial audio diffusion, in most cases under the generous tutelage of →
CD – Glacial Movements
Alessandro Tedeschi’s Glacial Movements has been recognized for several years for its meritorious work in the areas of experimental, ambient and drone, with a catalogue that plays host to the likes of Mick Harris, Scott Morgan, →
Near Future Laboratory, ISBN-13: 978-0990563303, English, 112 pages, 2014, USA
The Whole Earth Catalog was a revolutionary publication, conceived by Stewart Brand and published irregularly from 1968 to 1998. With the slogan “access to tools,” it listed and reviewed a →
CD – Marsèll
“Ye Shanghai” is a project originally conceived in 2012 as a performance based on film and audio. The source materials come from the years between 1920 and 1949, organized in order to bring the story of the →
The Foreigner, a work by Jon Rubin and Felipe Castelblanco, is a participatory artwork that connects US citizens with Iranian ones in real-time via human proxies or avatars. The work confounds notions of geopolitical identity by confusing and reducing distances →
CD – Unsounds
Italian composer and performer Alessandro Bosetti and Australian pianist Chris Abrahams have collaborated on A Heart That Responds From Schooling, a refined work that outlines hypnotic, abrasive melodies in a digitally domesticated setting of spectral atmospheres. Bordering →
Neural 50, Transient Gestures. Subscribe now!
Issue #50, Winter 2015 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN: 978-1623565091, English, 216 pages, 2014, UK
Sound is unquestionably about space; being present where vibrations are induced, and time; the exact moment when this is happening. But the act of “hearing” is a way more multifaceted →
7” – Corvo
Alessandra Eramo is a singer, performer and sound-artist born in Taranto, Puglia, but now based in Berlin. Her experimental attitude is intertwined with a contemporary reinterpretation of the traditional avant-garde, exploring relationships between voice and text in →
The Magnetophone, by Croatian artist Hrvoje Hiršl, consists of a rectangular metal frame housing 12 magnetic play/record heads and a system of wheels which drives a magnetic tape around a closed circuit. The tape heads randomly play or record onto →
