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.
Neural 68, Procedural Rejection + extra: Gaia Guardians zine by Patricia Domínguez . Subscribe now!
Issue #68, Winter 2021 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Spector Books, ISBN-13: 978-3944669793, English, 560 pages, 2021, Germany
Ten Cities is a hefty book that narrates all the research emerging from a collaborative music project led by Goethe-Institut from 2012 to 2014. The project →
The title of this work “Can the Subaltern Speak?“ is borrowed from a famous essay by feminist scholar Gayatri Spivak published in 2008. Spivak discusses how there is no account of the controversial Hindu Sati practice, in which a widow →
LP – Unsounds
Yannis Kyriakides is a Cyprus-born composer and sound artist (born in 1969), who emigrated to the UK in his early teens and then, after turning twenty, moved permanently to Amsterdam, where he now lives and works. Throughout →
Komma, Uitgeverij, ISBN-13: 978-9083065502, English, 224 pages, 2020, The Netherlands
Overlap – The no man’s land between art and science has a structure that is conceptually similar to that of a classical almanac, a popular →
The argument about whether or not digitalisation is a good form of preservation is redundant; despite the current digitalisation of everything, it definitely isn’t, technically or conceptually. “Floralia” by Sabrina Ratté builds on this fundamental but widely overlooked contradiction. It →
CD – z6records
Gert-Jan Prins and Lukas Simonis are two experienced and well-known improvisational musicians. For their first collaboration they created some harsh and dissonant productions, run through with noisy insertions, whistles and weird effects, and a whole bunch →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262044455, English, 472 pages, 2020, USA
Critical Zones is a major exhibition at ZKM, providing a comprehensive look at climate change topics through a vast range of artistic perspectives. Ironically, the →
Gordon Pask was a cyberneticist in the 1950s who experimented with electrochemical systems that exhibited elementary forms of learning. Ralf Baecker has investigated these systems and built a contemporary, evolved version of one of them. In “A Natural History of →
CD – Sofa
This is the first solo album of the Norwegian interdisciplinary composer and artist Tine Surel Lange, an experimenter known not only for her sound production but also for other kinds of creations, installations, performances and audiovisual works. →
Bloomsbury, ISBN-13: 978-1501344435, English, 278 pages, 2019, UK
Territorial research on specific media art is meant to highlight the particular cultural fabric that connects different art expressions within a geographical boundary. But while territory is →
Anger is part of human nature and although it can have useful and adaptive purposes for the individual, it is also considered a negative emotion. In any case, in the event that uncontrolled anger takes over, it can easily turn →
CD – Village Green Recordings
Snow Palms, a band now comprised of David Sheppard, Christopher Leary and Matt Gooderson – has released their third album again for Village Green Recordings. The term ‘post-minimalist’ is sometimes used to describe this collective, →
Diaphanes, ISBN-13: 978-3035803457, English, 276 pages, 2020, Switzerland
Following a research program that included workshops, interviews and an exhibition (“Open Scores”) at Panke Gallery in Berlin, this book aims to elaborate on “conceptual tensions” →
In a tradition of robots moving as organic entities (such as the ground breaking “Autopoiesis” by Ken Rinaldo from 2000), this work puts the surrounding audience in an uncomfortable position. Error 43‘s “Metamorphoseon“, inspired by the legend of Medusa, uses →
