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 – Plinkity Plonk
After ‘Holiday Diary’ in 2003, this is Enrico Wuttke’s, aka Flim, second release on Plinkity Plonk, a Korm Plastics parent label. It is made up of piano inspired music, an →
CD – Cronica
Shrill and charming sounds, bass and iterated frequencies, hypnotic drones, synthetic vibrations, hinting also to organic dimensions. Similarly to metallic insects’ breaths, in the dark bubbling of weird spaces and →
CD – Adnoiseam / Goodfellas
Breakcore generates hybrid fruits, developed from the insertion of very dissimilar sensibilities, that, for instance, produce this ‘art noveau’ artwork. The Adnoiseam experts prepared all these sounds →
CD – Ajabu/Family Affair
This album is composed by refined groove rhythms, inclined to minimal influences, jazz scraps, live sounds inserted on substantial programmed sounds, and eclecticism that seem to be not →
CD – Strange Fortune
An electronic production rich in elegant textures, diluted sounds and dreaming atmospheres, mostly thanks to the iterated melodies that peep out from strange voices and meditative drones. Gloomy →
CD – Beau Brun
Songbirds of the world unite, Cagesan (small chirping birds coming from Tasmania) will be your vanguard. Everybody can be a rockstar, the super-goldfinch said (and we agree of course). →
CD – Grain Of Sound
If the first excitements about the laptop music’s novelties are already gone, time has come now to start to question more in depth the specific intrinsic characteristics →
CD – Staalplaat
Initially released by Staalplaat in 1999 (the same year of his passing away) as part of the ‘Box Of Silk And Dogs’ comes out again in an elegant triangular package →
CD – Hymen
This the Thomas Pujols, aka Nebulo, fascinating debut album. He can flatter himself of a Conservatoire National de Bordeaux degree in electroacoustic composition and at the same time he’s fond →
CD – Touch
Three long recordings, as in the ‘Iris’ debut album, bless again the elegant fruitfulness of Rosy Parlane. And again her sounds are presented with the refined Jon Wozencroft artwork: →
