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.
Cassette – Birmingham Record Company
Maya Verlaak & Andy Ingamells’ performance art is unusual and surprising. The two artists produced a simple and powerful outcome whose sonic implications are very engaging. The performance is also very significant in terms of →
Mo H. Zareei’s ”Material Music” features eight kinetic sound-sculptures made of an electromechanical actuator striking identical blocks of different solid materials, respectively brass, copper, aluminium, steel, hardwood, softwood, glass, and marble. The shifts in striking time are calculated through phase-shifting →
Oxford University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0190460167, English, 880 pages, 2019, UK
Five years in the making, this heavy tome is the first of two volumes investigating sound and imagination from a true multidisciplinary perspective (from →
“If only these walls could talk” we use to say when we are denied the acknowledgement of a situated past, and there’s nobody around who can support it. This concept seems admirably rendered by Nadav Assor in “Stone Tape”, a →
Field Recording Series by Gruenrekorder, ISBN-13: 978-8409128617, English, 264 pages, 2019, Germany
It is perhaps surprising that experimental music labels have recently produced some of the most interesting experiments in print publishing. Maybe →
One of the roles of sound art is to transform spaces by changing how we perceive them. Miguel Carvalhais and Pedro Tudela have mastered this approach in recent years, constructing installations made in classic or adventurous places whose sound, in →
umland editions, ISBN-13: 978-9082649543, English, 196 pages, 2019, Belgium
The ‘space of sound’, or the place where sound is perceived, can be interpreted as a philosophical space. It is the internal space where sound is →
“Groovular Synthesis – the Edison Effect reVisited” by Paul DeMarinis and Jo Kazuhiro stems from the collective project “Life in the Groove” they conducted during the years 2018-19. There is a central text (“Ditties and Odes to T.A.Edison”), which is →
Urbanomic/Art Editions, ISBN-13 978-1916405219, English, 264 pages, 2019, UK
Unsound: Undead is an anthology from Steve Goodman (aka Kode 9) Toby Heys and Eleni Ikoniadou. It deals with sound, ultrasound and infrasound (respectively sound →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1501313868, English, 304 pages, 2019, UK
As a young boy the poet Rilke explored phonoautography, where sound waves produced mechanical etchings on a surface that could be subsequently played back. He wondered →
