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.
12” – Lomechanik | Esc.rec. | Shipwrec
The name The Void* (pronounced “The Void Pointers”) is a tribute to the C ++, programming language, whose semantics are relatively minimalist but also versatile, power and recursive. Similarly composite, this trio – →
servus.at, ISBN-13: 978-3950420005, English, 160 pages, 2015, Austria
The current trajectories of digital data are appropriately summarized in the editors’ introduction: we have simply “lost control” of our digital data. Nevertheless this book is anything but unruly, and articulated in →
Do stressed materials emit sound waves? Yes, definitely, as we learn from the existence of Ultra Acoustic Emissions, or “ultra high and ultra short acoustic waves that travel through materials in conditions of stress.” Christoph De Boeck has brilliantly used →
2CD – Touch
Claire M Singer is a well-known Scottish composer and instrumentalist accustomed to the formalities of tradition but also comfortable with electronics, musical direction and live multimedia. Solas (“light” in Gaelic) is her slightly belated debut album released →
Duke University Press, ISBN-13: 978-0822360391, English, 312 pages, 2016, USA
What is acoulogy? One of its definitions is: “the study of the mechanisms of listening and the musical potential of sound.” It’s a neologism defined by Pierre Schaeffer that Michel →
Geert-Jan Hobijn, founder of the mythical Staalplaat label, has conceived and produced socially relevant sound artworks in the last decade. Starting with the concern acknowledged by transnational authorities about the amount of plastic spread in seas, a problem that is →
CD – Marsèll
Roberto Paci Dalò is back on Marsèll Records, the label on which he had published Ye Shanghai in 2013, an audio-visual work based on the ghetto’s history of that populous metropolitan area. Now, in the wake of →
Archive Books, ISBN-13: 978-3943620344, English, 288 pages, 2015, Germany
This is the catalogue of the exhibition “Eran Schaerf. FM-Scenario: Reality Race,” a composite documentation of the artist’s work. Schaerf produced artists’ news radio plays since 1997, and, since 2002, a →
Fracking is already famous as one of the most environmentally devastating practices used to extract hydrocarbons from the soil. It injects large volumes of high-pressure water into the ground in order to break rocks and facilitate the flow of shale →
Audio data cassette – ArtKillArt
In LogForData’s ProjectSinge several audio coding protocols are extracted from a 56k modem, fax machines and personal computers from the 1980’s. Texts of on-line conversations between the different members of an IRC channel are also →
The MIT Press, ISBN-13: 978-0262028769, English, 248 pages, 2015, USA
In the sixties, computer music was mostly produced in isolated laboratories and university departments situated in various parts of the world. Only a few of these are still active in →
Dust Bunny by Alan Warburton is a small bunny composed from “dust harvested from ten visual effects workstations” at Studio Mainframe. The bunny is not an accidental shape, but an exact representation of the so-called Stanford Bunny, a 3D test →
LP – Nebularosa
Can the lullaby as a genre serve as guiding idea for an experimental electronic music project? Obviously yes, and it is no mystery that lullabies could be found in almost every culture from ancient times to the →
audioMER, ISBN-13: 978-9492321206, English, 240 pages, 2016, USA
The conductive properties of graphite have been used by sound artists in different ways – as a freeform tool available to the public in “Paper Circuits” by Franziska Windisch, Martin Rumori, Christoph →
