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 pioneers and avant-garde electronic musicians have traced a furrow of theories and practices most of the time away from the lights of museums and large institutions. But just to be learned →
The run-up to the latest technologies fueled by the sirens of marketing is a sad chimera guarantee of success that almost never keeps his empty promises. The genius, however it is often stimulated by →
Display the music seems to be one of the 'necessity' art of the last decade. The projection of spontaneous generated, algorithmic, abstract, poetic or simply arbitrary visual interpretations of music (performed or reproduced) is →
book – Harvard University Press – ISBN 0674008898
Even if these years there’s a sort of mythology of analog instruments, which are seen as a passage towards the radical digital transformations, one can say that →
After the sensational case of the Grey Album and the remarkable number of people who participated to the Grey Tuesday, a large and strong battle front is starting to emerge to protect the artistic use →
Yet another audio/visual symbiosis between a musician and a videoartist who integrate their abilities amplifying each other. Three tracks where dark ambient sounds and the bouncy percussions of Pure, from Vienna, intertwine with Johnny Dekam’s jumpy narration. →
dvd video – Carpark
The collaborative dimension created by connected machines takes a different value when it’s part of a live performance, with its uncertain and unique nature. The 242.pilots, a close group of artists →
cd+ – Crónica
Tuning sounds and visuals by fingering a touchpad and a keyboard is an art as complex as playing music and projecting a video. Moreover, including sounds and visuals in a normal compact disc →
Microsuoni, sequenze astratte e liquidi slittamenti minimali dalle forme progressive e sempre mutevoli in pulsioni naturali filtrate attraverso un approccio sintetico. Ryoichi Kurokawa non è affatto piattamente descrittivo (o bucolico) in ‘Copynature’, sembra piuttosto essere interessato alle →
Yoshi Sodeoka, from New York, has made his first ‘physical product’ after years of prolific visual experiments, such as those of ASCII Rock, where he reprocessed in ASCII characters some vintage rock videos, and those of Casket, →
