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.
Transform data is one of the most interesting practices of contemporary electronic artists, they move from one domain to another domain of knowledge interfacing software and sometimes even pieces of hardware. Scratchrobot made by the Belgian →
'Share taste instead of files' reads one of the payoffs of Last.fm , broadcaster streaming in London which carries updated techniques to customize his plays. Drawing on the experience of years developed spontaneously in mailing lists →
Memory Plains Returning Adam Nash is a musical suite in seven movements (Memory Boxes – Memory Forest – Memory Sheets – Memory Plains – Epiphany Memory – Memory Used – Memorised Regret) which is represented in →
NAG (Network Auralization for Gnutella) is a software for Jason Freeman, who draws on the amount of sound data in continuous circle in the infinite ramifications of the Gnutella network. Scheduled for Mac OS X and →
A year since the Bling Bling Server that hosts the ' mp3blog , a blog made exclusively of sound creations plagiarist Rick Silva aka Cuechamp, one of the most active creators of the scene. Once a →
Optigan rightfully belongs to this category, but with a singular peculiarity. The optical organ, in fact, made by Mattel in the early seventies rather than play simulated instruments, drew to a disk the size of an →
Earshot was one of the first projects related to the composition of sound through the network, providing the opportunity to tap into the immense amount of files present in the countless servers around the globe. Available →
Simple mixer of sounds, combining many sounds to keyboard keys or scratch or effects, there are plenty of them were developed in the last ten years. Despite this there is still room for entertaining and products →
.art
01.07.03 Neonlight, colored neon lights guided by sound.
Neonlight is an interactive music visualizer, made using Shockwave by the japanese Makoto Yanagisawa, which exploits the aesthetic paradigm →
Presented at the last edition of Sonar Audiopad is an interactive musical instrument developed at MIT Media Lab by James Patten and Ben Recht musician. Useful for both composition and live performance detects the position of →
