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.
CD – Mazagran
Empathizing with the suggestion that a bird’s eye image may be translated into sound, Yannis Kyriakides makes use of satellite images gathered from different sources. “I often think of →
CD – Valeot
Attilio Novellino is a musician-experimenter and a native of Catanzaro, whose sound is strongly soaked in a dark and intense cinematic appeal with echoes of post-rock music. Here →
12″ – Staalplaat
Simply by looking against the light at the white vinyl, we are able to distinguish the three sound tracks, recordings that don’t present the regular separations usually found on “normal” →
CD – Degem
Degem
Concretist music, abstract and environmental, juxtaposed together with hardly classifiable research and field recordings: this is the substance – in short – of fourteen different authors selected and edited by →
CD – Room40
Chihei Hatakeyama, the Japanese investigator, is remembered for his debut album inspired by the philosophic works of Theodor W. Adorno. “Minima Moralia” was published by Kranky Records in 2006: from then on, Hatakeyama’s research has centered on →
CD – Baskaru
Metallic strokes, sparse voices, buzzing insects, sirens and dogs barking. Emmanuel Mieville is very skilled at capturing moments of reality in exotic contexts. These recordings were made in Costa →
CD – Kvitnu
Extracting the CD from the very elegant “special cardboard double sleeve”, an hexagonal box with polished embroidery and playing the record soon leads to the realization that the content is equally as precious as the design. Kateryna →
CD – Contour Editions
Harsh frequencies, superimposed in layers, obtained thanks to the feedback of a Walkman and emissions produced using short and medium-wave radios. These are some of the techniques employed by Alfredo →
CD – Ohm Resistence
The grooves of “Harvester” offer a very shady, almost maniacal sound, characterized by slow cadences and post-rock influences. Gator Bait Ten, comprising M. Gregor Filip, Simon J. Smerdon, Kurt Submerged →
CD – Winds Measure
Organized as a transversal field recording orchestra, the combo of Scott Smallwood, Sawako, Seth Cluett, Ben Owen and Civyiu Kkliu structured this project, providing a draft of unprocessed recordings strictly localized in fractions of 10 minutes →
