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 79, Tactical Publishing (postscript) + extra: the artist’s poster “The fall of fiber optic control, power and paranoia” by Cèsar Escudero Andaluz. Subscribe now!
Issue #79, 2026 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: →
CD – Penultimate Press
The two initial voices of “The Fly Abstracted Death” converse over a seemingly disjointed, solemn, and slightly lopsided piano interplay that accompanies an equally eccentric black-and-white video populated by flying insects and a female hand flitting →
dpr-barcelona, book, ISBN 978-8412494266, English, 288 pages, 2025, Spain
Establishing Arts at CERN has been a courageous undertaking, as producing artworks within a programme directly linked to the world’s largest particle physics laboratory, consistently combining highly →
CD – Gruenrekorder
The SoundLapse project, promoted by the Universidad Austral de Chile, was born with the aim of connecting the characteristics of local fauna with the global issues related to the environment, culture, and sustainability. In this context, through →
The invisible intrusion of systems that quantify and record our faces has faced some boycott since the introduction of the first surveillance cameras, with people using masks, garments, and make-up techniques. Jip van Leeuwenstein’s sophisticated mask (“Surveillance Exclusion”) is a →
Open Humanities Pres, book, ISBN 978-1785421433, English, 416 pages, 2025, UK
History requires context to connect facts and events, and art history equally needs context to understand art movements, artists, and artworks. This →
CD – PAN
The nine tracks Florian Hecker chose for Natural Selection reflect an approach based on highly specific methods of synthesis. Unlike previous works, the album’s unity is not conveyed through a linear narrative, but it rather develops as →
The devastating assault still underway in the Gaza Strip has produced harrowing images that have flooded our eyes, but in such abundance that they now seem almost normalised. Israeli artist and architect Eyal Landman, while completing his master’s degree in →
Verso Books, book, ISBN 978-1836742180, English, 192 pages, 2026, UK
What do (machine) images mean for us today? Do they still ‘represent’ something, or have they begun to ‘activate’ something else? Trevor Paglen has devoted →
CD – Cronica
The fact that the cities ceaselessly pulsate, breathe, and transform is one of the founding insights of modernity. As early as 1926, with Le Paysan de Paris, Aragon—a surrealist writer and poet—rendered an image of the →
The simulation of voice has a long history, which has crossed very different techniques for simulating our vocal apparatus. From the purely mechanical, such as the Euphonia allegedly created in 1820 by the Austrian inventor Joseph Faber, using a piano, →
Torque Editions, book, ISBN 978-0993248788, English, 292 pages, 2025, UK
The political role of libraries is receiving focused attention from artists, writers, academics, and activists. Researching this role, as the project behind this book has done, →
LP – Discrepant
Deeply intersecting the history of turntablism with experimental electronics and improvisation, Takuro Mizuta Lippit – aka DJ Sniff – arrives on Discrepant with a single-track album that runs over thirty-two minutes. Former artistic director of the famous →
The participatory sound installation On Air, by artists Peter Van Haaften, Michael Montanaro, and Garnet Willis, is presented as the materialization of an “alchemical” process (i.e., a process of algorithmic conversion of acoustic data) through which sound—in this case, the →
The fall of fiber optic control, power and paranoia by Cèsar Escudero Andaluz. A limited edition poster featuring a map that shows all documented cuts made to the Internet’s undersea cables, part of his research project “Infrastructures of Dissidence”.
