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.
Continuum Pub Group, 296 pages, 2009, English, ISBN-13: 978-0826429711
The title of this book is a good start. In fact it starts where →
In the First Surrealist Manifesto (1924) surrealism was defined in terms of automatism: “pure psychic automatism, by which an attempt is made to express, either verbally, in writing or in any other manner, →
CD – Ant-Zen
Dark ambient sounds, subtle and powerful in their krautrock influences, modulated in highly experimental passages, make Scott Sturgis’ comeback particularly fascinating. Sturgis is a producer from Seattle better known as →
Stripping the work of Ludwig van Beethoven of its musical components and performing only its tempo: this is the conceptual operation at the root of “Beethoven’s Piano Sonata, no. 1 – →
Fabric is often measured by touch. When sliding textiles through fingers, the thickness of the yarn and the distance between the plot and the horde cause various sensations; the heaviness of soft wool or →
The Secret Sounds of Spores is an installation created by Yann Seznec and mushrooms expert Patrick Hickey. As the title suggests, Seznec’s intention was to translate the movement of spores into sound. →
Sound installations frequently dispense with linear musical time by means of spatial arrangements. In the work “another soundscape” by Chung-Kun Wang, linear time is reintroduced and represented spatially following the model of western →
Reel to reel tape machines are dinosaurs compared to the digital audio workstations we use today and old timers are usually grateful not to have to resort to scissors when an edit →
errant bodies – records, #05, 2009
“I wish the medium would be inside me” says Leif Elggren in an interview with the label owner Brandon LaBelle. The uneasiness that characterizes Elggren’s work →
2CD – Paradigm Discs
An essential retrospective of Max Eastley’s sound installations, a prolific artist who’s been active since the late sixties. The oldest works presented here were made in 1973, the →
