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.
Sub Rosa, ISBN 978-9609368704, English, book + CD, 48 pages, 2012, Belgium
“Sirens” was an audiovisual performance by Thanasis Kaproulias (Novi_sad) and Ryoichi Kurokawa that took place at different festivals around the world. This book is due legacy to its effective and distinctive nature. Its name is particularly symbolic in expressing the relationship between Kaproulias’ sounds and Kurokawa’s videos. The vocal power of sirens to freeze seems to be perfectly embodied in Kurokawa’s collection of ghostly video pictures that are included in the book, conceptually separated by time codes. These videos, endowed with a high level of precision in both rhythm and design, are able to affect the viewer’s perception in both firm and gentle ways, and are coupled specifically with the scientifically articulated sounds of Kaproulias. Following his own recognised artistic practice he uses tracks from five renowned experimental musicians (Richard Chartier, CM von Hausswolff, Jacob Kirkegaard, Helge Sten, Rebecca Foon) processing them through the technique of “applying data” obtained from recording natural sound phenomena (like, for example, earthquakes, Titan’s atmosphere, or the vibration of the Manhattan and Brooklyn bridges), all of which took place at the same time important economic crises unfolded. The results are perfectly described by Lucas Bambozzi in his introduction as “expanded cinematic experiences” and more then synaesthetic, they can be considered as destabilising, both perceptually and methodologically. As Bambozzi again notes, the ‘locus’ and the syntax of this work remain unknown.
Novi_sad + Ryoichi Kurokawa – Sirens
