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 – Oktaf
The GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales) is located in the headquarters of Radio France in Paris and is now part of the INA (Institut National de l’Audiovisuel). For over fifty years, the famous institution founded by composer →
Once there were paparazzi. Today, violators of privacy and the serenity of celebrities are perhaps more frequently hackers, or more correctly “crackers”, computer experts who use their skills to break into systems and steal data with the intention to harm, →
CD – PAN
From Berlin, the current world capital of electro-techno, comes this debut album from Objekt. Composed between 2012 and 2014 there is no doubting the freshness of Flatland. The title is surely a reference to the homonymous Sci-Fi →
Verso, ISBN-13: 978-1781685839, English, 454 pages, 2014, USA
Easily definable as the ultimate book about the Anonymous movement, this text is more than just that. Coleman has not only extensively researched the movement since the beginning, considering its different components →
CD – Discreet
Before listening to Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, we first enjoyed the stylish and original artwork accompanying this release, including the shiny all-black CD, replete with grooves emulating the tracks on a vinyl record. →
The MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262027649, English, 136 pages, 2014, USA
It’s a key player in the relationship between time and space, but what nontrivial roles does sound play in new media art? This seems to be the point of departure →
CD – Copy For You
Recorded in September 2012, in Kobe, Japan and with a cover designed by Biki, Tim Olive and Nick Hoffman’s No Flag is a project divided into five different parts that run from four to thirteen →
Fernando Velazquez is a Uruguayan artist who researches “privacy and mediators of control.” His Mindscapes series, which includes videos, interactive installations and audiovisual performances, is dedicated to brain activity and, in particular, the creation of ‘spaces.’ In “#L1, after Dan Flavin” →
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 →
