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+Flexydisc – Pulver & Asch
Niton’s members are Luca Martegani (analogue synths), El Toxyque (banjo, pipa, jaw harp and other instruments) and Zeno Gabaglio (electronic cello). The seven tracks on Cemento were recorded between 2015 and 2020 in an eclectic →
CD – Thrill Jockey
Even an unknown composer such as Bogusław Schaeffer can become the focus for the electronic manipulations of Drew Daniel and Martin C. Schmidt, the Baltimore duo who work under the moniker of Matmos. Throughout their careers, →
CD – No Type
Once referred to as the ‘Harry Potter of the digital vanguard’, Eryk Salvaggio was an early pioneer of the net art movement. His focus now is still relentless. Salvaggio uses artificial intelligence as a tool for →
LP + booklet – Noton
HYbr:ID I features eight compositions from Carsten Nicolai, under the Alva Noto moniker. They were originally commissioned to score Richard Siegal’s choreographed performance ‘Oval’, performed by the Staatsballett Berlin at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 2019. →
LP – Concentric Records>
Produced by Concentric Records, this new release from Tobias Freund immediately grabs our attention with its Fellini reference on the cover, showing the actor Marcello Mastroianni in La Città delle Donne. “I have movies in my →
CD + book – 1970/Silentes
Following on from his rock-electronic experiments with Meathead and Teho Teardo in the 1990s, Cristiano Deison turned towards even more conceptual and refined experiences by incorporating tape recorders, record players and other objects into his →
CD – Thrill Jockey
Mouse On Mars’ Dimensional People is a 2018 album that featured interventions from 50 musicians who subsquently formed an orchestra that included percussive robots and special apps for smartphones, resulting in an intriguing live performance. This →
CD – Opa Loka
Richard van Kruysdijk, aka Cut Worms, follows his two previous releases on Opa Loka – Cable Mounds and Lumbar Fist – with Breath Mule, a distinctive and hybridized aesthetic that can be found in the subtle →
3 x Vinyl – Axis
“There are many ways to imagine the future”. The techno icon, legendary producer and DJ Jeff Mills is immediately clear on this point. In the past he explored more experimental and artistic forms, often performing →
CD – Denovali
Oliver Doerell, Roger Döring and Alex Stolze, a Belgian-German band known as Dictaphone, present some exotic, cinematic and fascinating atmospheres here. Already on the first track of Goats & Distortions 5, the convincing chords stand out with →
