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 MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262018708, English, 232 pages, 2013, USA
“Contentlessness” is more than a brave radical gesture of the past. Even if extensively articulated by Cage, Rauschenberg, Paik and many others, the act of playing with a medium without, →
CD – Aural Terrains
Created using only a piano and a computer, this Michael Edwards release for Aural Terrains is impressive listening. Self-written software was employed in the compositional process and for the management of technical skills, modulating streams of →
The recent changes to (and consequent scandal about) Facebook’s research into mass-scale emotional contagion through social networks has garnered various reactions: from fatalistic passivity to loud outrage, from changing profile attitudes to deleting all posted content and signing off. Lauren →
LP – Dekorder
A city lives in unbridled luxury while underneath is the suffrage of a few. No, this is not the plot of Elysium but the last dystopia by Janek Schaefer, now back on Dekorder.schaefer assembles diverse materials →
University of Minnesota Press, ISBN: 978-0816680047, English, 344 pages, 2013, USA
This anthology of texts is another excellent contribution by Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman, charting the multifaceted relationship between text and media. It’s based on the comparative media studies →
Neural 49, Off-Western + extra: forged Caymans companies’ Certificates of Incorporation by artist Paolo Cirio. Subscribe now!
Issue #49, Autumn 2014 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free forged Caymans companies’ Certificates of Incorporation by artist Paolo Cirio →
Neural #49 extra is a forged Caymans companies’ Certificate of Incorporation by artist Paolo Cirio (only for subscribers for the printed magazine).
The Certificates used to be part of an installation and they were meant to be the “paper trail” →
CD – World Edition
This work, co-producted with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (rbb) is the latest project by Peter Ablinger, an Austrian composer with a background in jazz and composition who since the eighties has been based in Berlin and has been →
Sousveillance, or the recording of an activity by a participant, usually using small portable/wearable cameras, implies not only a change of perspective, but also a different balance of power. The collective Shinseungback Kimyonghun has created a pure sousveillance suit for →
12” – Pan
Bill Koulingas’ Berlin-based PAN Records focus on electronic, experimental and sound art, promoting a rather harsh, abstract, conceptual and techno-oriented catalogue. We are in the borderland between clubbing culture and a more sophisticated investigative approach, a form →
Black Dog Publishing, ISBN: 978-1907317989, English, 240 pages, 2014, UK
This book promotes itself as a celebration of 25 years of the relationship between art and the internet (although 1989 doesn’t seem like a particularly landmark year for internet art). →
CD – Denovali
This new release by Matthew Collings – a composer now based in Scotland – is published by Denovali and features six compositions. Collings, who has been involved in several interesting collaborations (e.g. with Dag Rosenqvist of Jasper →
What if we could strike an object from a distance and listen to its acoustic qualities using a pulse of light as a projectile? Aernoudt Jacobs has been investigating the field of photoacoustics, inspired by a lesser-known invention patented by →
CD – Gruenrekorder
There’s an unusual story behind this release. In 2013, millions of cicadas invaded the metropolitan area of New York. These insects with a musical attitude appear only once every seventeen years and some consider the event a →
