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 + booklet – Crónica
Máquina Magnética are an experimental all-star combo featuring Pedro Tudela, Miguel Carvalhais, Gustavo Costa and Rodrigo Carvalho. Tudela and Carvalhais are known for their project @c and as founders of Crónica, the record label behind →
CD + book – Raster
With the unusual title ‘OpticoAcoustic Oracle’, Greek sound artist and aural experimenter Thanasis Kaprouliasalias, alias Novi_sad, presented an audiovisual project in the ancient city of Olympia on the eve of the flame lighting ceremony for →
Online – NN
“Current Suite No.1″ by Nuuun is a suite of four audiovisual compositions exploring an interchangeable use of frequencies that we can both see and hear. These compositions are inspired by early 1970s video synthesizers and Scan Processors, →
LP – aussenraum
The project Biblioteq Mdulair – yes, that’s the way it’s written – has a setting made from 15 analogue generators played by the Swiss Emma Souharce and Daniel Maszkowicz. The two conceptual experimenters are also focused on →
CD – Von Archives
From Von Archives, an Italian label interested in the intersection of the visual and sonic arts, comes a classic work by Phill Niblock, a well-know minimalist composer, filmmaker, videographer and the director of Experimental Intermedia, a →
Fluctuating Images, ISBN 978-3000510724, English, 152 pages, 2015, Germany
Five years after the influential book Audio.Visual: On Visual and Related Media, Cornelia Lund has co-edited a new book on the same topic, this time with Ana Carvalho. Officially instigated to →
CD – Denovali
Today, digital communications, the proliferation of media, concerns for personal privacy, networked surveillance and the ability to hack networks, all generate particular previously unthinkable conjunctions in the relationship between individuals, institutions and communities. The topic of espionage →
Gestalten, ISBN-13: 978-3899554861, English, 80 pages, 2013, UK
Nicolai’s science-oriented artworks have some unique characteristics including a polarised shifting between complexity and simplicity that always deeply involves our senses. It is not by accident that his intellectual proximity to long →
CD + DVD, Hinterzimmer
Virgil Moorefield is a composer and intermedia artist highly esteemed for his acoustic performances, which often include processed and visual sounds. Five Ideas About the Relation of Sight and Sound can be thought of as related →
Among the media used for artistic purposes, the vinyl record has played a special role. It has been around for more than a century and has outlasted many others. It is one of the very few media that can function →
