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.
Errant Bodies Press, ISBN: 978-0988937543, English, 112 pages, 2016, Germany
Jason Kahn (see the interview in Neural #55) is a sound artist who has spent a good deal of time investigating what he calls “active listening” practices, raising the awareness →
Sound Development, ISBN: 978-8480265393, English, 263 pages, 2016, Switzerland
This is another expedition organised by Sound Development, and another thirteen sound artists, landing this time in Belgrade and Athens, two very symbolic cities for current times. This printed and, →
Gruenrekorder, ISBN 978-3-00-052370-0, Huao, Basque, Spanish and English, 176 pages, 2016, Germany
In the product page on the label’s website the description of this release ends with this warning: “Partially legible. Sunlight reading recommended”. It’s hard to fail recognising that →
Medicine and music have an intertwined history, going back to shamanic traditions that live on within contemporary practices aiming to heal body and mind through sound. Michele Spanghero taps into this notion obliquely with “Ad lib.”, a disquieting sound sculpture →
If early cybernetics was tied to the development of self-regulating machines, which were imagined by their makers as analogous to biological beings, later the discipline expanded to an environmental scale, simulating the complex interlinking of different processes within whole ecosystems. →
A shotgun, with holes in its barrel transforming it into a double flute, played through a juxtaposed mechanics, inflating compressed air, and guided by Arduino-based programmed board to “play” the US army export market in the last decade through alternating →
One of the legends about Saint Francis is that he was able to literally speak to animals and be perfectly understood. The legend describes a dialogue beyond mere empathy and beyond any pretence at recognising the cause and effect of →
Béchard Hudon mentions two concepts that inspire his Daily Waverings II installation: the Planck time and the Zero time. The former is the smallest temporal unit (10 elevated -43 seconds), while the latter is a conventional reference to observe any →
Timeless Editions, English, 196 pages anno, France
There are important histories that are written from different authors and scholars and there are important histories that are left to the public memory, never documented or seriously researched. The Staalplaat label has →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190234621, English, 232 pages, 2016, UK
Environmental sound can be defined as the sounds obtained from vibrations structuring a specific environmental context (a forest, an office) producing a psychoacoustic experience. Beyond the different methodologies – from →
