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.
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262028127, English, 304 pages, 2014, USA
One of the last bastions of independent media in USA, low-power FM (LPFM), has been regulated by law through the concession of frequencies, and was made finally available to citizens →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-0857856616, English, 232 pages, 2014, UK
Vinyl is one of the oldest living media, with an intriguing mixture of tactility, sound quality and visual appeal. After loads of books about compulsory collecting, record fetish and the worshipping →
RIXC, LiepU MPLab, ISBN-13: 978-9934843419, English, 312 pages, 2014, Latvia
In its journal format, Acoustic Space dedicates a second volume to “Techno-ecologies” continuing a strong ongoing interest in the relationships between art, technology and science. RIXC founders’ Smite and Smits →
NYU Press, ISBN: 9780814743508, English, 352 pages, 2013, USA
Following a decades-old debate between the entertainment/cultural industry and the advocates of free access, the three authors of this book have chosen to write about media distribution (including appropriation). They try →
International Neighborhood Verlag, ISBN: 9783944960012, German, English, French, 278 pages, 2014, Germany
Using print as a subversive gesture might seem tricky, as the immobility of the print medium doesn’t immediately lend itself to subversion. But one simple way to accomplish →
Edith Russ Haus für MedienKunst, ISBN: 978-3000460180, English, German, 191 pages, 2014, Germany
The compilation of encyclopaedias, or the reduction of knowledge to manageable chunks, offering a catalogued as-complete-as-possible overview, has always been a problematic issue. In fact, the arbitrariness →
Near Future Laboratory, ISBN-13: 978-0990563303, English, 112 pages, 2014, USA
The Whole Earth Catalog was a revolutionary publication, conceived by Stewart Brand and published irregularly from 1968 to 1998. With the slogan “access to tools,” it listed and reviewed a →
William Heinemann, ISBN-13: 978-0434023158, English,, 320 pages, 2014, UK
In the early public era of the Internet (the second half of the nineties), the dream of finally having a horizontal medium, enabling many-to-many communication, free from censorships and time/space/money constraints →
Verso, ISBN-13: 978-1781685839, English, 454 pages, 2014, USA
Easily definable as the ultimate book about the Anonymous movement, this text is more than just that. Coleman has not only extensively researched the movement since the beginning, considering its different components →
MIT Press, ISBN: 978-0262027656, English, 328 pages, 2014, USA
Sean Cubitt’s most recent book combines a high level of intellectual elaboration with detailed reference to source materials. It is unusual to find a book in the field of media theory →
