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.
The Witteveen+Bos Art+Technology Award 2014, ISBN: 9789490335076, English, 50 pages, 2014, The Netherlands
How can a printed material “sound”? This unanswered question has probably resounded many times in the mind of Geert-Jan Hobijn, founder of the experimental label Staalplaat and →
CD/CDR + Book – Mimehaus
A new technology allows you to copy objects and people. We are in the field of science fiction, or, if you prefer, fiction science. Eric Lunde, whom we remember for Audio Demonstrations on Amalgamated Torso →
Electroacoustic feedback is one of many standard techniques in the bag of tricks of the experimental musician and a staple of sound art installations engaging with media specificities. Its allure lies in its simplicity: any electroacoustic chain composed of microphone, →
Meson Press, Hybrid Publishing Lab, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, ISBN13: 9783957960009, English, 346 pages, 2014, Germany
Gamification is a term that originally referred to a process in which games were understood as essential for society and culture. After the exponential →
In Mexico they say that “a los muertos de hoy los tapan los de mañana”, namely that every crime is soon overshadowed by a newer one. 80,000 have been the victims of a war between law enforcement and organized crime →
André Stordeur is a Belgian electronic musician whose career was launched in 1973 with a tape composition commissioned by Eric Convents and Roger Steylaerts – a soundtrack to a film about Gordon MattaClark (who, along with artists like Laurie Anderson, →
NYU Press, ISBN: 9780814743508, English, 352 pages, 2013, USA
Following a decades-old debate between the entertainment/cultural industry and the advocates of free access, the three authors of this book have chosen to write about media distribution (including appropriation). They try →
Widely regarded as the first science-fiction novel ever published, the Somnium by Johannes Kepler is a brilliant learning tool with which the German scientist was hoping to convince readers to embrace the Copernican doctrine. In the story Kepler submitted himself →
Neural 51, Revive + No Patent Pending book for free to the first 40 Neural renewal or new subscriptions . Subscribe now!
Issue #51, Summer 2015 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now because only the first 40 subscribers will get a free No →
MER Paper Kunsthalle, ISBN: 978-9491775673, English, 84 pages, 800 numbered copies, 2015, The Netherlands
There are some books that manipulate content and form to create a seamless continuum of a central idea. This anthology of texts is one such book: →
The first 40 subscribers (new or renewing) to Neural #51 will receive a free copy of “No Patent Pending, self-made performative media” beautiful book (only for subscribers for the printed magazine).
The power of a shared 3D file is its ubiquitousness and infinite duplicability. Being usually used for private or commercial purposes 3D prints have plenty of potential for reality interventions. Tider and Greenspan perfectly couple this technology with a celebration →
CD – Denovali
With Engtanz Depression Stephan Otten and Oliver Klemm can now boast of six releases with Denovali under the moniker Sankt Otten. Their collaboration with the German label began in 2009 with Morgen Wieder Lustig, a project that →
The MIT Press, ISBN13: 9780262028080, English, 208 pages, 2014, USA
Dyson tries to interpret spiralling global economic debt and environmental crises through an updated philosophy of music in her new book The Tone of Our Times: Sound, Sense, Economy, and →
