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.
Long before the orchestrations of [The User] and their symphony for needle printers, there was someone who, in 1970, could extract melodies from a noisy printer. It was the IBM 1403 printer (made in 1964), from →
32.000 points of light is an immersive installation which explores fanciful visual ambients whose only point of reference is made of several points of light. In fact, the guides of the sense of →
by Alessandro Ludovico.
Our perception of viruses stems both from the way we consider the most recent epidemic diseases, such as AIDS, and from an innate fear of having one’s own body invaded by other efficient organisms, capable of →
by Alessandro Ludovico
After the disembodiment of the physical medium (cd vs mp3 files) do you think the music world is ready for the disembodiment of the musical performer?
Not at all, on the →
by Alessandro Ludovico
You said that “The body became a source as well as a site for surveillance.” Surveillance also means the disembodiement of people and the construction of the people’s data-doubles. It’s a progressive loss →
by Alessandro Ludovico
What about a worldwide surveillance cameras survey? Did you ever planned collaborative efforts like this?
We are already helping to create a web site to which people could post pictures and →
by Alessandro Ludovico
In your opinion is there a specific language of ‘information noise’ (Information of any kind that is not clearly useful to the user such as voluntary glitches in a music tune, →
by Alessandro Ludovico
What, in your opinion, is the worst danger for the free software, and what is the strongest point that still makes it worth for millions of people?
The worst danger comes from →
artist: VARIOUS ARTISTS
title: Virtual Reality Handbook
label: Minus Habens Records
code: MHCD014
format: Book of 40 pages + mCD
feat.: CLOCK DVA, IT.
notes: Virtual Reality, like all the present →
A common issue in presenting experimental music and sound art is finding an effective way to share with the audience the fun of exploring unconventional uses of musical objects. Reinventing, hacking and sometimes →
