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 78, Voices, Humans, Machines + extra: the artist’s poster “VOICE_ERASE.PY” by Robin Rimbaud – Scanner, and the catalogue of the Sussurra Luce sound art festival. Subscribe now!
Issue #78, 2025 ISSN: 2037-108X
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Software artists in the 2000s experimented with forged documents generators to obtain social support or to produce fake cease and desist letters. These documents were plausible but featured a distinctive aesthetic. In Morry Kolman and Kendra Albert’s Heavyweight, the generated →
CD – Soleilmoon
Nikola Tesla’s legacy is a symbolic device, a device that continues to radiate potential. His experiments do not remain confined to the domain of technique, but are articulated as thought in the form of energy, as →
Fundação MEO, ISBN 978-9729968594, English, Portuguese, 204 pages, 2025, Portugal
Still largely unacknowledged by official art history and the contemporary art scene, (inter)net art remains relevant to scholars and institutions, who recognise its visionary and →
The Werlit Incident is a video game created by Dorian Jovanovic. It is set in a dystopian world inhabited by miniature, black hole-like creatures that consume all light. Humanity’s last hope is an artificial sun powered by bioluminescent beings. All →
CD – Dissipatio
Distant recordings captured in Norway and subsequently interwoven with studio sessions – thanks to a self-built crystal radio, accompanied by light, detectors, motors and antennas – give life to a technological and sound transposition of the Northern →
Set Margins, book, ISBN 978-9083449807, English, 208 pages, 2024, The Netherlands
There has been particular attention paid to energy in scientific and artistic circles, understandably due to its universal quality. This attention has been greatest →
When can malware be considered artwork? The art created with computer viruses in the early 2000s demonstrated how unproductive and disruptive code can foster critical ideas. Peter Burr, Mark Fingerhut, Bridget DeFranco, and Matthew D. Gantt developed Natural Contacts, a →
CD – Serotine
Anthony Laguerre and Les Percussions de Strasbourg construct in Myotis V an amplified percussion device that weaves both organic and electronic sounds, dilated free form sequences and electroacoustic whispers, exotic noises and minimalist translations. On his first →
FLEE Project, book+CD, ISBN 978-2956967774, English, 166 pages, 2025, Switzerland
The African galaxy of media production has often been represented in Western societies, particularly in Europe, through exhibitions and initiatives that reveal theories and →
There is a bearable level of surveillance and then that which is unbearable. This threshold of what is bearable has shifted significantly over time to accommodate more surveillance. In the last 20 years, artists have explored the materialisation of the →
6CD – Auryfa | Metaphon
Poly-Art Recordings 1976-1982 is a 6-CD set curated by Auryfa and Metaphon. It brings together for the first time, a reissue of the series of self-produced cassettes and vinyl records by the Romanian-French composer Costin →
Studio Joost Rekveld, Brussels, KASK & Conservatorium Gent, ISBN 978-9491564185, English, 176 pages, 2025, The Netherlands
If you follow Joost Rekveld on social media, you will often be surprised not only by the complex technical →
Recently, artists’ interest in the ecology of energies has dramatically increased as they investigate scientific discoveries and work with their findings to produce engaging artworks. Sunjoo Lee’s Electric Garden belongs to these practices, using microbial fuel cells, which generate power →
2CD – Gruenrekorder
This is a two-CD release, the first features twenty-one tracks from sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Sergio Armaroli who is active in the free form and experimental scene, the second contains thirty songs from Steve Piccolo. Two distinct →
