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 – Room40
When we talk about sound-art, we know already that the images recalled are typically dystopian and inspired by a generic criticism of hyper-liberist and globalized society and this work also follows this pattern. Lawrence English is an Australian experimenter who has already shown his audience his familiarity to the references and the quotes of the contemporary musical avantgarde (Approaching Nothing) and to more intimate and rarefied weaves (Fable with Stephen Vitiello on Dragon’s Eye Recordings). This interpretation key, without specifically thinking of the contents, allows us to get a different meaning to the sounds. The sounds are relevant because of their formal expression: a refined style exercise. The sequences are sensitive and full of emphasis, dilated and epic, resonant but quiet too somehow. About Cruel Optimism, though the project may be considered a vibrant treatise with nothing other than its elegant stylizations, Lawrence English highlights “this is an album about power and how it may condition two fundamental aspects of humanity: obsession and fragility”. The work owns an inner coherence, related to the author’s feelings, in between a “private” and a “political” dimension. The title alludes to the theories of Lauren Berlant. According to him “a relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing”. The result of these theorical-existential weaves is involving and recalls the failure of a “good life”: the consciousnesses fold on themselves and this is a perception we can never fully trust. The Room40 label includes several artists who definitely are not easy, but still holding some grandeur, for example Taylor Deupree, Kenneth Kirschner, Richard Chartier and Marina Rosenfeld. The choice of Lawrence English confirms this artistic attitude. He does not leave the listener indifferent and is able to involve even an audience more expert and doubtful.
