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.
It’s impossible to resist to some old sound boxes charm: in the end there are sentimental reasons. The more the market displays the last shop window’s shining device (boxed and with the obscure instructions for a →
A shofar is a ram’s horn used as a musical instrument for religious purposes in Judaism. Mentioned in Hebrew Bible and throughout the Talmud, it is played during high holy days of Rosh Hashanah, the beginning →
According to Pasolini, ‘we don’t have a body, we are a body’. Accepting this principle, in a society that traditionally tends to separate mind from body, would change both the social and the linguistic →
If the telephonic conversation is one of the frames of interaction where, according to Ervin Goffman, people play their identity, then the ‘definition of the self’ and the ‘performance’ are the founding concepts of Tavofono, the →
Harddisko is an installation made by Valentina Vuksic (a Media Art student at the Zurich University of Design and Arts), focused on what is really at the core of any ‘computer music’ discourse: the raw PC →
Sonic Acts opens on the 23rd February at the Paradiso and De Balie in Amsterdam. It’s an international festival that investigates the use of sounds and images in the digital arts. After a decade →
Let’s imagine a typical situation: a jam session where talented musicians play all their creativity improvising, listening to each other and reacting to inputs. However let’s think about the trio (AKA triumvirate) consisting of →
The idea of sound on paper is not surprising thinking about the codification of the staff on the score. As the same time digitalization has made us used to the fact that data of different nature →
Constanza Silva is a new media artist who creates complex interactive environments where sound and robotic are the essential elements of a connected network. Silverfish Stream is her most recent artwork and, according to the →
According to its author, the software artist Sven Koenig, Scrambeld?HaCkZ! is a useful tool aimed to infringe copyright. Konig claims that intellectual property is a misconception deeply conflicting with the principles of any cultural production →
