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.
Pen Drive USB/Micro SD – Comatose
It takes around 15 minutes to copy the 15.66 Gb of audio files, videos and texts to our hard disk. This memorable release by Terre Thaemlitz for Comatose Recordings includes 32 hours worth of MP3s, 80 minutes of films and more than 150 pages of PDFs. It seems implicit that such a quantity of material can’t be analyzed “normally”, in a purely critical way; I was thinking about this while loading my MicroSD card on the USB adapter, an action not usually correlated with the usual enjoyment of music. Terre Thaemlitz doesn’t need too many introductions: his productions for Comatose, Mille Plateaux and Instinct Ambient are many, and the project developed under the DJ Sprinkles moniker for Mule Musiq and Skylax is well known, not to speak of his engagement as a multimedia artist, writer and cross-cultural activist. Soulessness is essentially made of several audio compositions and texts, images and talks on religion and faith: a “writing” that includes two different musical scores, the first one composed of 11 tracks, subdivided in songs and “bonuses”, and the second forming a 29 hour-long continuum. The text is equally strong in body and “feelings” (“I have never encountered a form of spirituality that did not involve the reification of ignorance”), thus Terre Thaemlitz “baptizes” us in the first lines of “Rosary Novena for Gender Transitioning”), all brilliantly imagined, only apparently with naïveté (the author is careful not to approach his readers in an “intellectual” or “theoretical” way, though a strong personal involvement is evident – as well as the conditions for inner division that provoke a love/hate sentiment towards Catholicism). It’s a work that, in the end, doesn’t merely discredit religion as much as fake believers (those in the experimental scene, too).
