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.
Editions, ISBN: 978-3033060722, English, 244 pages, 2017, Germany
“How can words convey a sense of place?” This is a relevant question not only for our visually obsessed society in general, but for sound art in particular where textual →
MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262035262, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
The essential moment of transition between the mechanical and the media takes place rapidly with the pervasive use of electricity. Its impact on our perception of sounds, beyond →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0195374711, English, 264 pages, 2016, USA
The representation of the ‘listening experience’ in classic movies has always conflicted with the dominance of the visual and its compelling narrative. Apparently we tend to relegate sounds, music →
In the movie “The Little Mermaid” the powerful King Triton is protective and authoritarian towards his daughter Ariel; while she, like any teenager, has a strong desire to go beyond impositions. Her curiosity obviously falls into what is most banned: →
Some media look back at their distant original history to what has been lost, or become unavailable. With our post-digital facilities to digitise and reconstruct, it’s relatively easy then to revive and repurpose this specific media in our hybrid worlds. →
The correlation between sound and architecture has been frequently articulated on space as the primary medium through which sound and structures can be expressed. Rarely, instead, have specific architectural principles been applied to sound, applying this kind of transdisciplinarity to →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501327605, English, 198 pages, 2017, UK
Reversing the role of specialised technologies from tools to agents is an approach shared by inventors from the past, artists of all times, and contemporary experimental makers. Cathy van Eck is →
Digital principles are “reductive” in their own essence, as they’re committed to the unavoidable task of quantifying any type of information into numbers. This methodology is constantly and considerably applied to the majority of productions and transmissions of human-managed sound on →
Kerber Verlag, ISBN-13: 978-3735602213, English, German, 304 pages, 2016, Austria
Leitner’s artworks have extensively investigated the ability to acoustically experience space in strict relation with our own physicality. Defined as “sound-space sculptures” they have involved the viewer in intimate and →
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN-13: 9780988937567, English, 64 pages, 2016, Germany
How do you document a collective workshop made by sound artists and theorists with quite different backgrounds? Various attempts to translate scattered notes and scribbles into printed notebooks have been →
