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.
The sequencing software interface is a de-facto cultural syntax with which sounds are composed, and, starting with the basic tasks accomplished (as the sounds drag and drop for their sequencing, and their eventual →
PD (acronym of Pure Data) has recently emerged amongst the many software devoted to real time sampling and audio/video streaming, mostly thanks to its flexibility during live performances. It’s a real time coding environment suitable for →
Chris O’Shea, a digital artist living in the UK, has always been interested in the relationship between interactive spaces and sound synthesis. However he recently decided to explore the connection between synthesis (aka frequency modulation) →
Sampling, copyright and collage, these are the research fields of the Copyright Criminals: this is a sampling sport documentary, conceived as a work in progress, and shot by Benjamin Franzen, a Changing Image video-journalist, and →
The ‘inappropriate’ use of a commercial software for different purposes is one on the infinite possibilities of data processing, that can be shared on the net, or can be extended as we more and more reappropriate →
The dissemination of music as files has exponentially increased during the last years, creating a social phenomenon that has manifested itself in the form of hardware and software players. If the the former is →
The annoyance associated to an unavoidable noise (a dripping sink for example) has a continuous repercussion on our psyche, even if it overcomes our constant awareness. The artist Alexander Berman →
From such a long time a dance and the electronic technologies have found a good connection, mostly in the use of motion sensors. These devices allowed the body to expand its movements beyond themselves, giving the →
If the generative music has created the vision of automated music systems, the developments that really has brought a sufficient independence degree and acoustically appreciable results has come from different areas. Pet_00by Laura Baxter and Simon →
Vinyl is perhaps the last organic medium that has still its own importance in the music data transmission. Its characteristics of collateral unclean sound are impressed in the memory of some generations, and for this →
