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 76, What is real? + extra: a Destructive Circuits by Dani Ploeger . Subscribe now!
Issue #76, 2025 ISSN: 2037-108X
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CD – Arjunamusic
The elegiac passages that open this release from Arjunamusic Records immediately take us back to the electronic music of yesteryear modulated in real time. A type of musical performance that in the pre-internet era was decidedly more →
CD – Room40
On Cursory Asperses, Celer offer auditory experiences built around water sounds from rivers, streams, lakes, beaches, and swimming pools. All were captured using cassette recorders and combined with various musical instruments including synthesizers, organs, cellos and pianos →
Sound walks have become a consolidated theory and artistic practice over time, with various acoustic devices enhancing or revealing participants’ listening abilities. In Embedded/Embodied, Farzaneh Nouri & Arash Akbari add a computational layer by training an artificial intelligence (AI) to →
LP+book – REV. Lab.
There are 24 tracks in under half an hour on Traces, the latest effort by Filax Staël, a collaborative project led by Bas Mantel and Okko Perekki – both of whom are well-versed in working →
CD – Futura Resistenza
The motivation behind this release from Nika Son was to support the director Helena Wittmann, who for her film Drift (released in 2017) needed a musical concept that was consistent with a wide range of narrative →
This immersive reality experience, Symbiosis, created by the Dutch experience design collective Polymorf in co-production with Studio Biarritz, unfolds in a specially designed physical environment. Drawing inspiration from the speculative worlds of Donna J. Haraway – participants can choose to →
CG-ARTS, ISBN 978-4903474717, Japanese, 802 pages, 2023, Japan
Within Japan, which still remains relatively inaccessible to the West, there has been a long-standing pronounced and outstanding tradition of the production of new media art. A →
CD + booklet – The Dim Coast
The first elaborations of this work by Canadian sound artist Christof Migone, date back to 2002, the year in which the Auditorium project began. There are five tracks – all recorded at different →
If ‘there are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew’, as McLuhan stated, where is the public opinion on climate change? Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (interviewed in issue #26) provides an answer with Climate Parliament, which consists of thousands of →
The MIT Press, ISBN 978-0262547956, English, 320 pages, 2024, USA
It is not only the comparison between the representation of land in the past and the present that should exclusively influence our awareness of the →
CD – Touch
How does the dominance of technology spread and amplify and how does our perception of reality change as a result? This is perhaps the most significant question that artists, philosophers and thinkers have had to deal with →
Disnovation.org (Nicolas Maigret and Maria Roszkowska) has taken on the absurdities of energy management in the industry and continues to produce technically advanced and conceptually strong works. With The Solar Share, a microalgae culture produces edible biomass every day →
Valiz / RADIUS, ISBN 978-9493246348, English, 256 pages, 2024, The Netherlands
We are earthbound. With this quote from Bruno Latour, the editors set the tone of Worlding Ecologies, an anthology of texts that emerged from →
LP + book – Nothing To Commit
Notes On Cuts is written and produced by art historian and scholar John Peffer, who, with a truly atypical and inspired approach, critically recalls the censorship perpetuated by the South African Broadcasting Corporation →
