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 – Artek Sounds
Here we find a vocal stuttering, a sort of gibberish where a series of hardly decipherable words are emitted, winning us over. We are talking about “Sermon On Wings And →
CD – Flux
We remember Frank Rothkamm for his “multiform inspiration and lack of prejudices and genre barriers”, for a kind of hybrid music able to combine “classic tradition and rock culture, interweaving computer music strains, cut-upping and free form →
3″ Mini-CDR – Electroton
Edizione limitata (di sole 150 copie) e in mini-cdr 3 pollici per il sound-artista Higuchi Eitaro, sperimentatore di base a Kyoto che sotto il moniker di Dagshenma sforna la sua prima release per Electroton, etichetta guidata →
CD – Domizil
S basic elements of each auditory event: the oscillations. The feedback and non-linear filters, frequency distortion, granular synthesis work, crackle and various kinds of noise, combine to generate a →
CD – Kafkagarden
In “Music Library 1” Marcus Fjellström takes inspiration from classic music libraries – collections of sounds that were used in sixties and seventies movies and low cost television productions. →
CD – Die Schachtel
Analog synthesizers, a Farfisa organ, turntables, a tape recorder, a CRT TV: all devices that have no reason to exist without electricity. The relationship between the instruments and →
CD – Record Label Records
Abstract sound design and experimental atmospheres meet a fusion style, mixing electro-acoustic beats and creating an artificial and frantic post-IDM pastiche. Record Label Records, a record label founded →
CD – Ad Noiseam
New implementations by David Thrussell, who once again renews his personal approach to production, on the one hand remain faithful to the artist’s reputation, while also proving him →
CD – Ad Noiseam
“Vade”, the debut album by Roel Funcken, one of two founders of the combo Funckarma, reflects many starts and contemporary electronic envelopes, connecting diverse trends and attitudes, in →
CD – Ant-Zen
Dark ambient sounds, subtle and powerful in their krautrock influences, modulated in highly experimental passages, make Scott Sturgis’ comeback particularly fascinating. Sturgis is a producer from Seattle better known as →
