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.
Data DVD – LINE
Not for the first time did our office player release sounds that made us doubt that our equipment was functioning imperfectly: actually this happens quite regularly to people who focus on the contemporary experimental scenes. However →
DVD – ((audience))
Written as a quadrophonic audio work in three movements, Cricket, Tree, Crow explores the vocal mimicry of the sounds produced by members of these species, focusing on the imitation of forms of expression unnatural for human vocal →
CD – Auditory Field Theory
The audio captures of Francisco Meirino in An Extended Meaning For Something Meaningless become almost inessential – in this case the experimentation is focused on the audio spectrum: the electronics here are static and immanent, →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822353928, English, 304 pages, 2013, USA
In the small galaxy of noise music, there’s a specific, ideal place for dealing with its edge, pushed by the intrinsic extreme nature of noise itself. In the imagination of →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262018876, Finnish, 296 pages, 2013, English
The language challenge of spam is one of the most underestimated experiments in man-machine relationships. Spam is mainly triggered by the self-feeding appetite for algorithmically generated money, from the classic →
CD – Ad Noiseam
Combining electronic music and classical instruments is a trend that has been consolidated by international avant-garde movements. Within this field Stavros Gasparatos is well known for his skill in subtly balancing the two elements. His work →
MiniCDr – Electroton
In spite of being a limited edition of just 100 copies, this MiniCDr published by Electroton focuses the attention of international audiences on another interesting Ukrainian electronic experimenter. It’s not the first time that the German label →
Bloomsbury Academic, ISBN-13: 978-1849660396, English, 224 pages, 2013, UK
It seems that our ancestral attachment to nature has not been forgotten, especially if you look at how we use natural metaphors to name technological products and services. We even integrate →
Printon Printinghouse Ltd, ISBN-13: 978-9529323135, English/Finnish, 256 pages, 2013, Estonia
This is the first in a series of publications originating from a specific “field” laboratory at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Lapland/Finland. Invited by the Finnish Society of Bioart, a →
![Siegfried-Zielinski-–-[...After-the-Media]](https://backup.neural.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/Siegfried-Zielinski-–-...After-the-Media.jpg)
Univocal Publishing, ISBN-13: 978-1937561161, English, 275 pages, 2013, USA
Finally translated from German, this essay by Siegfried Zielinski is very involved with contemporaneity, and it presents a preeminent discourse on current media, taking into account their “relational” quality. Starting with →
