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.
LP – Noton
The Xerrox series, which began in 2007, several years before the separation of Raster-Noton into two independent labels, concludes with this fifth installment. For Carsten Nicolai, it represents a laboratory investigating digital aesthetics: copies, radical manipulations, sampling, →
CD – Mind Travels Series
Sudden Fruit is a collaborative project in which Japanese pianist and composer Midori Hirano and sound architect Ivan Pavlov create, with surgical precision, an immersive and ghostly work that is suspended between acoustic and digital →
LP – Amorfik Artifacts
Originally from Ukraine but now based in Madrid, Iury Lech released his first album way back in 1989 on the groundbreaking Spanish independent label Hyades. Lech is a pioneer in his own way, emerging from a →
CD – Noton
‘There is no defense, opposition, or rejection to the hubris of the hybrid form’. This was a comment from our review of the previous release in this series, which began in 2021 and propels Alva Noto back →
CD – Room40
Under the moniker Amby Downs, Tahlia Palmer presents Ngunmal and I Am Holding My Breath on Lawrence English’s Room40 label. The two compositions last almost 29 and 21 minutes respectively, and were designed both by virtue of →
CD – Noton
This is the second volume of the Hybr:ID series from Alva Noto and features his compositions from the soundtrack to the Ectopia – Shooting in the Corner show at Tanztheater Wuppertal. The show, directed by Pina Bausch, →
CD – Wandelweiser
The English word “tracery”, “flechtwerk” in German or “nervatura” in Italian can be translated in different ways, first of all as “interlace”, which is well suited to the idea of intricate electronic music, but also as “embroidery”, →
CD – Zoharum
Zoharum has a quite eclectic relationship with its releases, alternating proposals from different electronic scenes: ambient, minimal, industrial, dub and experimental. 78-Angst, for example, is a conceptual collection of productions Patryk Gęgniewicz (Revisq) and Lukasz Szalankiewicz (Zenial) →
CD – Denovali
Samuel van Dijk, aka Mohlao and VC-118A, returns with the moniker Multicast Dynamics and releases his fifth album with Denovali. From the first sequences, the environmental approach is clear. There is a recognition of some abstract sidereal →
2 × Vinyl, LP – NLS
From the first track, Ficciones by Paul Prudence reveals a hypnotic sense of estrangement and seduction, thanks to some cosmic and meditative sequences, with infinitesimal audio emergencies, field recordings and very elegant treatments of →
