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.
LP – Aussenraum
Ethereal, suffering, unpredictable but also excruciating frequencies soon peep out in this issue by Jim Haynes for Aussenraum. Electrical Injuries is a composition divided into six different tracks which are packed with tangled textures, unhealthy atmospheres and corrupted sounds. These sound connections can be raw or sourcing out from well-defined manipulative interventions that show no real difference as to what is important for the author. What currently seems to be important for Haynes is to express the sound corruption without filters and formal embellishments which are more resolved, cruel and vibrant when compared to the past. Haynes has found his own way to win attention keeping high the climax of the narration and giving birth to harmonious repetitions, balanced derailments with no excesses, thus always modelling the listening with penetrating and hypnotic vibrating waves. The inspiration can count on a lot of the typical stylistic choices of industrial noise even if the idea is that everything has already been heard and that the new potentially harmful electronic evolutions evoke an heartfelt urgency. Haynes, who lives in San Francisco and is still a multimedia installation artist, is pleased to remember that his passion to manipulate auditory captures often leads him to forget the transformative proceedings of those same elements. It is believed of course that it is necessary to use a large number of techniques and skills that in Electrical Injuries have a lot to do with other forms of consumption such as splits, breaks, oxidation, scrapes and decays which are well-organized parts with a precise collocation in the album. If in the real electrical wounds, the person becomes part of the circuit and the in and out electrical points are recognizable, here the vision is much more modulated, bearable, continuous and insistent and it hides much more subtle ways to hit the listeners’ sensitiveness. Finally it evokes a merely apparent damage that instead is new nourishment for our perceptive system which is always on the alert in the remodulation of sounds and information.
Jim Haynes – Electrical Injuries
