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.
2LP – Aussenraum
Active since 2006 and based in Lausanne, the ensemBle baBel is a group of musicians which has already worked with Christian Marclay. In 2012 the band played four works by the composer. In his musical attitude, the group does not make any difference between antique, classic or contemporary music. Similarly, they pay an extreme attention to different musical cultures and to integrate new technologies and musical methodologies into their own background. A main concern of the ensemBle baBel is actually to integrate their research with the live sets, which may be held in different locations (acoustic, architectural, urban) and performed with the participation of scientists, artists, art galleries and museums. Christian Marclay is a New Yorker experimenter, who stood out for his many-sided artistic works (sound, photography, video and film) and shares the same attitude about the interconnection and the multidisciplinary. So, this collaboration is no surprise to us and it refers to “Screen Play”, dated to 2005, “Graffiti Composition”, made between 1996 and 2010 and “Shuffle”, a piece dated to 2007. The guitar of Antonio Albanese leads the five musicians in “Screen Play”, with Anne Gillot (flutes and bass clarinet), Laurent Estoppey (saxophone), Noëlle Reymond (double bass) and Luc Müller (drums). In “Graffiti Composition” Jacques Demierre’s spinet sweetly empathizes with the musical atmosphere: the execution is typical of a visual score and is different from traditional notation, since the musician is not able to read in advance what later follows. Probably this creates a larger indeterminateness in the electroacoustics sequences, which are rich with improvisations. We also remember that Marclay posted, on the walls of Berlin streets, the first scores of the composition. (These score were later covered by graffiti and then reassembled to form a new musical score). The last track, “Shuffle” is on the second vinyl. This time there is a random score, formed by some photos printed on a deck of cards. Behind these works, there is a clear attempt to rethink and conceive some ways typical of the improvisational tradition.
