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.
Danilo Montanari, ISBN: 978-8897753087, English/Italian, 286 pages, 2014, Italy
During the Artelibro (Italian artists’ book fair) in 2013 there was an exhibition about the use of records as a medium by artists. Selected from the curator’s extensive personal collection, the →
12” – Le Cabanon
Released only on 12″ vinyl for Le Cabanon, this Horla production references two fantastic horror tales written by Guy de Maupassant in the late 19th century, stories that many literature aficionados consider exemplary chronicles of human →
Trees have voices, but they are mostly inaudible. For several decades scientists have been studying the acoustic emissions of plants in order to gain insights into plant physiology. A paper published by Milburn and Johnson in 1966 on the conduction →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Crossover between experimental work and more normative fields of contemporary music (especially those that incorporate elements derived from electronic scenes) has always been a path fraught with danger – though one offering many possibilities for fruitful →
BIS Publishers, ISBN: 978-9063693145, English, 192 pages, 2014, The Netherlands
The dream of influencing or even dominating other minds has always been present in megalomaniac human beings. But what was just a myth in the past has now become (partially) →
CD – Line
Under the moniker Pinkcourtesyphone returns Richard Chartier, with his fourth extended release for Foley Folly Folio. Description of Problem features artists such as William Basinski, AGF, Evelina Domnitch, Cosey Fanni Tutti and King Congo Powers, who contribute →
“Artificial” is a term whose meaning has evolved from defining non-natural things, to distinguishing things so close to nature that confusion ensues. This is leading to frequent cultural confrontations between humans and machines, as “Computers Watching Movies” by Benjamin Grosser →
CD – Consumer Waste
Playfulness with spatiality is immediately evident in these three recordings (around 29 minutes in total) that were captured and performed in multiple locations in a nature reserve on Kapiti Island, New Zealand. The area is famous →
Autonomedia, ISBN: 978-1570272646, English, 256 pages, 2013, USA
As a provocative but systemic reaction to the constraints of the economic crisis, cultural activists have conceived a number of their own counter-acts, which have materialised in theories, artworks, actions and productions. →
CD – 845 Audio
These three newly created tracks by Canadians Tim Olive (who runs the 845 label) and Anne-F Jacques feel homogenous in their inspiration and quality of sound. The sounds forming the record were amplified and manipulated by →
As with many of our consumer technologies, the historical trajectory of sound recording has been one of progressive banalisation. If the first people to listen to recorded music in the late 19th century thought they were experiencing a form of →
CD – Hubro
Norwegian Frode Haltli is a very sensitive accordionist whose excellent technique has been repeatedly witnessed in a series of works undertaken at the most diverse geographic and stylistic latitudes. In this fourth release for Hubro, the musician →
Print has intrinsic archival qualities, being, as with other static media, a portrait of content frozen in space and time. E-publishing is exactly the opposite: its ephemeral digital structure (which has to be interpreted and executed by a machine every →
CD – Dragons Eye
This album opens with iterated patterns that unravel with extreme precision. Appealing multiform textures and subtle crackling audio emergencies accelerate, slow down and reassemble at will in a cascading catalogue of new sequences. The skillful articulations →
