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 Continuator is the research project of Francois Pachet (Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris). It’s a experiment focused on real time interaction with a system that can distinguish and memorize different music styles. These →
The coding of conceptual works through the programming code is a peculiar form of ‘digitalization’ that implies an important mediatic shift (from a material medium to an immaterial one), even if at the same time it →
cd+dvd – C0C0S0L1DC1T1
The relation between sound and vision has become clearer since the introduction of their interpretation as sets of binary data. In their numerical abstraction, these →
The interdisciplinary approach that characterizes the most interesting groups of audiovisual music sheds light on how the concept of 'group', especially if you also linked to a live performance dimension, has long since crossed musical →
The effort by multinational corporations to create ‘unique’ products that can characterize them more than the usual indiscriminate propaganda of their brand seems to be growing, and also to →
cd+dvd – Ninja Tune
The language of videoclips has undergone many semiotical revolutions in the 90s, the years when the possibility of video editing landed on home computers. The consequential big increase in the number →
dvd video – Kiasma / Kinotar
The pioneers and the avant-garde electronic musicians have beaten a path that often strayed far from the museums and big institutions. But they have something important →
Computers from twenty years ago, such as those made by Commodore and Atari, are the tools of a large community of music composers that go under the label of ‘8bit music’ and compose a remarkable →
The perception of events and objects changes dramatically depending on the context in which they are located. The performance, in particular, are related to the atmosphere that surrounds them and the events that happened →
'Making the revolution sexy' is the effective slogan that David Thrussell, songwriter of Melbourne applies for almost twenty years with his band, the Snog, a unique example of political activism is not ostentatious, and applied →
