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.
Sub Rosa, ISBN 978-9609368704, English, book + CD, 48 pages, 2012, Belgium
“Sirens” was an audiovisual performance by Thanasis Kaproulias (Novi_sad) and Ryoichi Kurokawa that took place at different festivals around the world. This book is due legacy to its →
Gelöschte Masse (“Deleted Masses”) by Hannes Seidl is a brilliant sound artwork using audio manipulation in a political way, through a sophisticated aesthetics. It’s a three channel sound installation consisting of five audio recordings from protests taken in different cities →
Von Archives, VON 022 DVD, English, 12-page booklet, 2015, USA
The Futurist Manifesto is a performance from 2009, produced to celebrate the centenary of the original Futurist Manifesto published on Le Figaro in 1909. Starting with the paradoxical consideration that →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262028868, English,, 256 pages, 2015, USA
We can easily relate to spaces that make sound audible within architecture and form. It’s a perfect relationship between the apparent stillness of architectural structures and the ephemeral movement of →
Physical Editions, ISBN-13: 978-0692215739, English, 695 pages, 2015, USA
The spatial dimension of the digital world is a very abstract idea. Being conceptually bound to the lightness and invisibility of atoms, digital is an imploded dimension in terms of its →
Spector Books, ISBN-13: 978-3944669892, English/German, 558 pages, 2015, Germany
The voice is our primary communication “device” and musical instrument, a volatile but powerful medium of expression, that takes on plenty of different roles. It has been used in artworks (especially →
Anthropologically we pay a lot of attention to voices, as they are crucial to recognise the presence of a fellow human. And “singing” is even more specific to human, from our perspective. But, especially with famous songs, we might remember →
Touch, # Folio 001, ISBN-13: 978-1874104018, English, 60 pages, 2015, UK
The inception of a new series (“Folio”) of hardcover books is a significant step for Touch, one of the most important “multi/media” UK music labels, with its more than →
Duke University Press, IISBN-13: 978-0822358893, English, 296 pages, 2015, USA
How we can define “sound” in the 21st century? Moreover, how can we define it indirectly through some of its key components? This book edited by David Novak (author of →
It happens to be outdoors, eyes are closed and ears listen to the sounds of nature. The wind moves through the trees, maybe a few animals, the passage of some sort of waterway and, above all, the flow of time. →
