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.
CD – Crónica
The connections between the radio-drama and the experimental music should be an object of study. Some mature reader may remember the strong relationship between these fields, especially during this age where the offline fetishism re-activates forgotten or obsolete formats. The Paris composer Emmanuel Mielville studied sound engineering in a cinema school and later learned the basic concepts at the Groupe de Recherches Musicales (GRM), a main institution for this unconventional culture. His current approach is the natural consequence of this training course. Juryo: Durée De La Vie De L’Ainsi-Venu recalls in the title one of the most famous Buddhist texts, the Mahayana, and recalls many quotes of collage technique, a tradition deeply rooted in all the Asian culture. It’s the perfect closure of the rim: the embracing and exotic sounds tell about some stories, and the album seems a travel of the imagination and mind. The field recordings are the object of manipulations and mixes. The weaves are narrative and enchanting: for example, the audio captures from the Copan monastery, the FM modulations of a Hong Kong radio or the Buddhist funeral singing in a small village in Taiwan. There are sounds of synthesis too (like in “Tanit Astarté”) or erudite Artaud-like quotes to Héliogabale, the moon godness or to the primordial Phoenician myths. Contemporary tastes are mixed to contemporary caesura, large space is left to different knowledge and suggestions, no need of any “tabula rasa” but skillful attempts to make centrifuges with the use of different techniques and theories. In Mielville the sound perception and the memories cut in the urban environments are the basis of the following stratification. The sound overlaps might be now out of focus and irregular, now clearly designed, but anyway they are the “concrete” substance the listener should get and represent his personal way to think of the sound as something unmeasurable and suggestive, a vibes travel which always refer to his passion for the radio medium. The release elevates the catalogue of Crónica Electrónica, a label since ever focused on this music genre and on the evolution of the sound concepts and landscapes.
