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 attention of multinationals towards products 'unique', which characterize most of the indiscriminate propaganda for the worship of their brand, seems to be growing and focused on the →
The 'player piano', or mechanical piano has probably been the conceptual precursor of the modern techniques of music sequencing. Her prepared data encoding music for playback always identical from one instrument has sometimes →
The visual path that is established in the viewer of a piece of visual music makes her different perception of sounds, the more it is linked to the output which is reflected on the →
The cultural role of interfaces in computer music software has greatly contributed to the development of contemporary styles and the evolution of production techniques. The iconisation of knobs, sliders and writings were fused to the →
Information Analog installation is the result of a collaborative project six months at the ECAL (the Cantonal School of Art and Design Lausanne), which involved the Swiss artist Lehni, along with Franz Hoffman and →
The definition of 'waves' sound represents an abstraction of the vibrations in the air with the sounds originate. But the choice of a representation that invokes the concept of 'liquid' (the waves, in fact), makes →
The methods of musical composition have been radically transformed within a few years by the software and its interface conventions. But this has also led the association processes of the sounds to be much →
Mashup, cutup, plagiarism, or whatever you want to call it, the creative use of clips and samples of songs more or less famous is so well-established practice that begins to make itself →
The intent of Iain Mott and Marc Raszewski (with Jim Sosnin already authors of Sound Mapping ) Summoned Voices acts as 'living memory of places and people'. In practice it is an interactive sound →
Transforming the data from the visual domain to the sound involves a conceptual shift is not indifferent. The mere association of the color of a pixel to a sound has arbitrary time, in fact, reached →
