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 – Baskaru
Gabriel ‘Gogooo’ Hernandez sounds are ethereal and crystal clear, weighted in delicate weaves. This Parisian experimenter is comfortable both with traditional instruments (melodic guitar, piano, barrel organ) and laptop or →
CD – Flux Records
This is a brilliant conceptual posthumous soundtrack, inspired by the Millenium fear, trying to sonify this atmosphere during the two years before 2000 in Los Angeles. Fear, city on →
CD – Riz(h)ome
A really long title (‘I don’t take my head to see HIGHER because the sky is landing over my neck’) for the third and last CD that wraps up the →
CD – Cronica
Very delicate drones, fluctuating atmospheres, rarefied ambient scores and glitches, fragments of a literary universe (Proust’s, in his ‘Récherche’, several times cited as the main source of inspiration →
CD & Booklet – Sonic Arts Network
This is the ninth implementation of the series curated by the Sonic Arts Network, a British organization dedicated to studying, spreading and pondering →
CDR – Gruenrekorder / Privatelektro
A CD-R compilation in limited edition (only 150 copies), the result of the collaboration of two experimental labels, Gruenrekorder of Frankfurt and Privatelektro of Leipzig. Fourteen tracks, →
CD – Touch/Family Affair
This is the first solo album for Kazuyuki Kishino, who used to release his works under the same moniker with Chris Watson and z’ev in 2005. Other albums →
CD – Spekk Japan
Using a computer or other traditional editing methods doesn’t matter. Electronic music as a category can be instinctively connected more to ‘how’ certain sounds are produced than to ‘with →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Iterated and minimal melodic micro-sequences, drones that evolve in dilated atmospheres, ambient textures and reverberations veined by a gloomy psychedelic allure, deep frequencies that cross the melancholic articulations of →
CD – Anechoic
Only thirty minutes of sounds in this new project by Kim Cascone, but they immediately carry us in imaginary liquid spaces, claustrophobic, gloomy and disquieting (almost like Twin →
