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 77, Reorientations co-edited with Morten Søndergaard + extra: the artist’s postcard “here:this place, a listening exercise” by Jana Winderen. Subscribe now!
Issue #76, 2025 ISSN: 2037-108X
Subscribe now! because only subscribers will get a free extra: the artist’s postcard →
LP – Noton
The Xerrox series, which began in 2007, several years before the separation of Raster-Noton into two independent labels, concludes with this fifth installment. For Carsten Nicolai, it represents a laboratory investigating digital aesthetics: copies, radical manipulations, sampling, →
Coral reefs around the world are increasingly being damaged by anthropogenic stressors, and maintaining healthy fish communities in this environment could counteract reef decay, but degraded reefs smell and sound less attractive to settling fish than healthy ones. Coral Sonic →
12″ – raster
The Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics, located in Frankfurt, is a leading scientific research center dedicated to the systematic study of aesthetic experience and the way in which people perceive, process and evaluate art and other →
Gigacities Collective, magazine, English, 140 pages, 2025, Germany
This first issue of Elon magazine is almost a psychedelic trip – packed with Musk portraits and is extremely colourful. It overwhelms the reader with a redundant visual →
CD – Mind Travels Series
Sudden Fruit is a collaborative project in which Japanese pianist and composer Midori Hirano and sound architect Ivan Pavlov create, with surgical precision, an immersive and ghostly work that is suspended between acoustic and digital →
The superhuman qualities we attribute to machines have historically concerned tasks related to labour and efficiency. However, with A Needle in a Haystack, Varvara & Mar explore what happens when these qualities are used to implement metaphors in their work. →
cassette – Edições CN
You are alone on your bike, cutting through the wet asphalt beneath the neon glow of the surrounding billboards. Your map app crackles metallic commands in your earpiece, algorithms that decide your route through the urban →
Thames and Hudson Ltd / V&A, ISBN 978-0500480977, English, 208 pages, 2024, UK
In perfect timing with the major Tate exhibition Electric Dreams, the Victoria and Albert Museum has teamed up with Thames and Hudson →
CD – Crónica
All thirteen tracks on this release were created on a Nord Drum 2 – an analogue percussion synthesizer – following an idea based on a 1-step pattern with variable tempo. Ilia Belorukov is a sound artist from →
Although IT and TLC are crucial to humanity and have gone through decades of technological innovation, they are often perceived as fragile entities, both on a personal and corporate level. We associate this fragility with what is visible, i.e. with →
CD – Room40
Pinkcourtesyphone is an ambient-drone musical project founded by Richard Chartier, a sound artist from Los Angeles who has been active since 1998. The combination of ‘pink’, ‘courtesy’ and ‘phone’ alone evokes a nostalgic and surreal aesthetic, confirmed →
smallest functional unit, ISBN 978-3000803475, English, 92 pages, 2024, Japan
This is the fourth issue of Graphème [1], a publication that succeeds in exploring contemporary productions of experimental music scores. Printed in a large format to →
10″ – Futura Resistenza
There are many precedents in music on the theme of lamentation, which has its roots in ancient funeral traditions and expressions of collective grief. These compositions, widespread in many cultures, have given voice to mourning and →
Mario Santamaría’s Emerald Black Latency is a project that explores the representation and material dimension of data circulation on the Internet, as well as the speculative aspect of an object that is real, but impossible to perceive in its entirety. →
