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.
. EMusic 
13:12:02 V_, the festival vj Bulk of Milan.
V_ is a show promoted by Box and Otolab, collective audiovisual research in Milan, hosted by CSA bulk of Milan and dedicated to VJing as an artistic practice. V_ is released by sponsors and business logic and calls itself an act of resistance audiovisual industry. Twinned with VideA_02 Barcelona and sponsored by Aivac, an international association founded under the auspices of the Council dÕEuropa and dellÕUnesco to promoting experimentation video nellÕarte and culture, V_ starts Friday, December 13. They open the inaugural evening the two vj resident crew of the project. To compare two very different aesthetic and practical understanding of the VJ, as if to draw the ends of the spectrum of variations in which it manifests the variegated scene of the live video. The post-modern aesthetic mix and collage of images of Box revisits, in a key post-film and digital instances of theatrical narrative and narrative film. The visual music Otolab is based on aesthetics rather minimal oscilloscope display of the sound waves, the relationship between acoustic data and algorithmic behavior of the images, revealing the offspring of an entire line of visual searches of electronic music and sound art . Box is a collective that brings to life each time to different projects, identified with a cardinal number, in an innovative reconfiguration of the relationship between individuality and artistic work of the group. For V_ Box 018 presents "UnÕimpurità not calculated", a tale mounted audiovisual live inspired by the novel by RL Stevenson's "Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde". Otolab presents some experimental live set of algorithmic audiovisual interaction, including "landscapes n ¡9" (mud-diesordre), "oscillaconcetti" (orgone-mud-sn), "3dgroove" (mud-maikko) and "bad logo" ( xo00), a vj set on the theme of political ties of big corporations. Special guest of the evening Dj Zak & Dj Tayone from Alien Army, who present their new show turntablism "Fresh Confidence". The combination of VJing to turntablism has a definite aesthetic significance: it wants to highlight the need for live video to stand out from the mere visual accompaniment to the music, a practice now in vogue in the context of "commercial", as well as turntablism indicates an artistic practice of intensive use and live the turntable, compared to the aesthetics of DJing mainstream.
Lavinia Garulli
