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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cassette – Staalplaat
Forty years have passed since the first publication of Opera by FNTC, published by Staalplaat, when the cassette format was not yet an aesthetic choice, as often happens today, but a necessity dictated above all by production →
Routledge, book, ISBN 978-1041161943, English, 120 pages, 2026, USA
The phrase “quantum mechanics” was coined in 1925, and after a century, the phenomenon of quantum computing is increasingly regarded as both a “next big thing” →
Several experiments in media art have involved feeding a machine with an input, then using the output as the next input in a loop, resulting in escalating degradation of the results. Maria Mavropoulou has employed this approach in Ecologies of →
12″ – HEIN?
The Bureau des Illusions Sonores (B.I.S.) is a French artistic duo composed of Elia and Adam David, specializing in the creation of unique and unexpected sound experiences. Their work reinvents the concept of DJing, distancing it from →
University of Minnesota Press, book, ISBN 978-1517916527, English, 232 pages, 2025, USA
This book has been eagerly anticipated, as Goriunova has delivered several public talks and keynotes on the topic, sharing aspects of her research →
CD – Sonic Rubbish
Eamon Sprod is a field recordist known for his significant collaborations, for example with Eric La Casa in 2019, David Prescott-Steed in 2022, and, previously, with Ernie Althoff. His work has long straddled the line between →
Entangled Others, aka Sofia Crespo and Feileacan, focus on the relationships between non-human life forms, technological infrastructure and computational processes. Their (di)atomic garden draws inspiration from a series of experiments conducted after the Second World War, the ‘atomic gardens’, in →
Set Margins’, book, ISBN 978-9083449876, English, 192 pages, 2025, The Netherlands
The crisis of information validation began on a global scale with social media and their promise to reduce the various communication levels from different →
CD – Raster
By the early 1980s, many areas of European artistic research were already seeing how the idea of the avant-garde—especially as a historical category—had run its course, becoming a style rather than a driving force for contemporaneity. At →
What sounds might we associate with climate change without supporting visuals? Sound artists have explored the territories of glaciers melting and the cries and calls of endangered species. Johannes Kreidler takes a different approach in his “Jet Whistles / The →
The MIT Press, book, ISBN 978-0262552547, English, 274 pages, 2025, USA
Cory Arcangel is certainly an anomaly in media art. Embodying a pure hacker DIY spirit, he has, in just a few years, become a renowned →
CD – empreintes DIGITALes
The symbolic figure of the garden—a recurring presence in cultural debate between the 20th and 21st centuries, embodied with a surprising capacity to resonate across diverse expressive fields—has not exhausted its evocative power and continues to →
Transit 5B-5 is currently one of the oldest satellites orbiting Earth. Although officially decommissioned, this space debris continues to orbit, occasionally emitting signals, in a sort of unpredictable limbo, like many of its counterparts. Sangbong Lee’s installation Space Odradek is →
Metalabel, Dark Forest Collective, book, ISBN 979-8992936414, English, 704 pages, 2025, USA
A Sexual History of the Internet is an artist’s book by Mindy Seu and forms one of three parts of an elaborate strategy →
