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.
CD – Baskaru
The textures of Sawako are delicate and iterative, pervaded by natural sounds but also dilated drones. Sawako moves with a quiet confidence in these night spaces, producing fluent concatenations, melodies and exquisite interludes. Six years have passed →
Ambra V, ISBN-13: 9783990435380, English, 632 pages, 2013, Austria
The preservation of media artworks has a destiny parallel with climate change: the more time passes, the more seriously it’s acknowledged. This thick volume is the final outcome of ZKM’s “digital →
CD – Bocian
You might remember Reinhold Friedl in his role as director of the classic ensemble Zeitkratzer in the remake of Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed, but the eclectic composer has many strings to his bow, having also →
The subway is an “in-transit” zone, although more and more people feel it to be a space continuous with “outside” life, thanks to the visual continuity guaranteed by their interconnected screens. Street musicians who spend most of their time in →
CD – Gruenrekorder
Everything starts with the movie by German director Michael Obert, Song From The Forest, a fascinating journey into the rainforest of Central Africa, organised in the fall of 2009. The notes of the release describe how Obert →
MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262027656, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Sean Cubitt’s most recent book combines a high level of intellectual elaboration with detailed reference to source materials. It is unusual to find a book in the field of media theory →
Noise is Full of Words, a performance artwork by the Spanish based Void collective, investigates systems of interpretation and pattern recognition across disparate domains. The work uses the translation of information between musical, spoken and notational systems to create meaning →
CD – 845 Audio
The term air in music generally refers to a tune, song or more broadly to a composition. All four tracks in Airs are presented using the same pre-defined rules in terms of the structure of the →
Victoria & Albert Museum, ISBN-13: 978-1851777976, English, 144 pages, 2014, UK
The ways contemporary global art investigates contemporary issues can often be totally pretentious, but sometimes also brilliantly accurate. “Disobedient Objects” falls into the latter category, being an exhibition about →
CD – Kaon
kdi dctb 071 by Cedric Peyronnet – aka toy.bizarre (also known as Ingeos) is based on recordings given by Guido Hübner, a member of Das Synthetische Mischgewebe, and part of the Berlin electronic, industrial and avant-garde of →
Many of the world’s banknotes are produced with paper derived from cotton fibres, which are durable and have a great capacity for absorbing chemical compounds. This ensures that banknotes, in addition to being notoriously “dirty”, collect, maintain and therefore track →
4CD – Potlatch
In 2010, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Éric La Casa were invited to the Uninstal festival in Glasgow to conduct a series of live home recordings alongside natives of the Scottish city. The result, Home: Handover, is a blend →
Polity Press, ISBN: 978-0745662831, English, 152 pages, 2013, UK
Can a book about surveillance published in early 2013 still be relevant in today’s post-Snowden era? In the case of this conversation between two noted theoreticians of surveillance, David Lyon and →
CD – Denovali
Thomas Köner is a media artist who attends to those border areas located at the intersection between the more purist and experimental spheres of sound composition, of the visual arts, of sound installation and of digital production. →
