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 external look of the hardware possesses a strongly symbolic component in the representation of its contents, and the makers of music machines have known this for a long time. Reinterpreting this axiom, the artists Mark →
Audiogame is a collection of experiments in interactively representing sounds, realized using Flash by the french marc Em. They’re ideas realized in a lightweight code, which exquisitely visualizes sequencing, scratching and, more generally, sound composition, abstracting →
The so-called Bastard Pop, or mesh-up, or plagiarist pop, that is, the art of freely remixing famous songs protected by copyright, is more and more practiced by musicians and hobbyists alike. ‘I →
‘RLA’, the Recent Live Archive, collects the live performances of Farmers Manual and other artists of their entourage, from 1995 to May 2003, in a chronology made of more than 72 hours of mp3 audio files and →
dvd video – Carpark
Yoshi Sodeoka, with his ‘c404’ handle, is among the artists who prefer experimenting on the fringe of the ‘official’ electronic art exhibitions. He’s got a very peculiar and recognizable →
Atmospherics/Weather Works is a performance, an installation and a distributed software project aimed at extracting sounds from storms and other weather events. The sounds are generated directly from the original data of the event in a →
Image-to-sound conversion is a fluid theoretical frontier hard to limit to a simple association by similarities. In the field of sound composition, through the use of image-elaboration software, this practice, effectively implemented by the software MetaSynth, →
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 →
by Alessandro Ludovico
‘Digital with human touch’, this is often a synthetic description of your music. Do you think we’re getting used by interfacing ourselves with machines in a more and more symbiotic relationship, or →
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 →
