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 generative sound is conceptually tied to a kind of 'black box' that churns out tunes plausible depending on the parameters set. The algorithmic construction of the melodies is so connected with the change of →
The sound installations in recent years are discovering, thanks to the techniques of receiving, analyzing and manipulating digital sounds that lurk in our surroundings. Frequencies obtained from bodies and sounds that vibrate at a short →
The music sequencing generated by sequences of objects materializes one made by some luster with the software programs, transferring the habits of juxtaposition of the sound samples in a physically accessible, and fulfilling from →
The materiality of the body, the bulwark of the physical size and touch while everything around us seems to dematerialize and bounce between cables and antennas, the last decade has been one →
The interpretation of the sounds through different domains of knowledge is a practice that flourishes thanks cultural abstraction imposed by the new media and their ability to reduce all knowledge to poison information. This perspective →
The EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) can be considered as an esoteric phenomenon whereby recording ambient sounds seem to perceive voices, physically unexplained. The spoken sentences, then, appear to be precognitive of events, or revealing elements →
The transition from the mp3 format files in a medium of communication has been made at the turn of the millennium with Napster before and networks then equal. The role of content traveling in the →
The laptop is not just an imaginary musical meta-instrument able to coordinate and generate admirably data streams, but for its size and for its mobility, it is an extension of the ability of structuring →
The ecology of the sound urban, populated with the production of portable devices and calculation of induced frequencies, promises to become one of the most humus-rich audio experimentation. The analysis and algorithmic variation (more →
The combination of image and sound, and their duality, complementary and parallel at the same time, implies by 2001 many of the curatorial dell'Avanto Helsinki Media Art Festival. But the most outstanding features of the →
