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 – Museu Serralves
The accuracy, the dark charm and the structural organization of the sounds of Marc Behrens are immediately recognizable in Irregular Characters from the first moments of listening. The work stands out for its absolute quality and →
Nouvelles Editions SCALA, Centre des Arts Enghien les Bains, book+dvd, ISBN-13: 978-2359880465, 196 pages, 2011, French, France
This monograph celebrates thirty years of activity of one of the most well known French media artists. It was produced in conjunction with →
Sextant Et Plus, Gantner Multimedia Centre, France, book+CD, ISBN: 9782953965032, 176 pages, 2013, English, French
eRikm is a French sound artist who connects sound and visual arts in a natural way, and effectively expresses in his works the relationship “between the →
The ‘pataphysics (the initial apostrophe indicates recursively the lack of a pataphysical prefix) is the next evolution after physic and metaphysic and is defined as the “science of imaginary solutions”. It is (together →
The sound art scene has received a tardy acknowledgment, and then only because of the fascination of its technical apparatus and of the extensive use of sound in installations / electronic works of art, instead →
The concept of fluid space, ie the organization of information in a three-dimensional environment, summarizing graphics, images and sounds in an environment navigable in three directions is the pivot around which the Belgians →
The (uncertain) non-linearity of the information, culturally assodate from the concept of ‘link’, is slowly but irreversibly changing Western culture, transforming our enjoyment reassuring ‘start to finish’ in a path that is defined as ‘in →
The Mouse on Mars are in their own way a ‘kind’ of contemporary electronic music, through which raw and assonant sound collage, surrounded by syncopated rhythm changes and insertions without burrs stuck to the rest →
After more than a decade of artistic practices related to new media, the world of digital art and media is still confined to its spaces, and has not yet made inroads into the culture linked to →
‘Limitation and Reduction’ seem to be the two aesthetic principles upon which the largest online community of musicians, fans of 8bit sounds: Micromusic.net. Born at the turn of the millennium it has become the reference point →
