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.
Picture Disc – Art Kill Art
With Art Kill Art the surprises never end: after an accurate analysis, the radio emissions from a Paris highway and from a farm lost in the French countryside are the subjects of some audio captures recorded during two weeks. In any position the entire frequency spectrum was meticulously recorded and later individually transcribed on a single audio track. Both sides of the picture disc show an image representing the levels of the frequencies, printed in sync with the sounds. The travel goes on across wi-fi waves, cellular phones, astronomical and satellite lines, aeronautic communication, FM and AM transmissions, electric charges, or jumps up and down with the communication breaks due to storms. The vinyl has in attachment a silk screen printed brochure with a text by the astrophysicist Eric Chassefière on radio waves’ properties and the benefits and a description of the protocol in use during the recording. We are unaware inhabitants of electromagnetic landscapes, but the author Nicolas Montgermont doesn’t show any sense of self-satisfaction when he reveals something that should be obvious to anybody. The author seems to be more interested in physically exploring the waves, their poetic essence, the vibes they produce and the way they spread around. If the transmission doesn’t exist, there is no sound. In this case the radio recordings go from 3 to 30 kHz. You may question the choice of two environments so different, one in “a dense urban area 300 m far from the Paris ring, 4 km far from the Eiffel Tower emitter”, the other in “a farm lost in a rural area”. Behind the work is a hidden concept: noise pollution does not necessarily need to be audible to human ears to have an impact, given that the two recordings don’t show a huge difference in terms of emissions activity and virulence. Despite these preconditions and the scientific approach (the samples are intentionally short, just 3.6 seconds each), this record, which is at the same time is an art object, sounds magnificent, a bit noisy, abstract and disorienting, full of the same energy necessary to spread the waves.
Nicolas Montgermont – Radioscapes
Nicolas Montgermont | Radioscapes // B – Besseuil Extract // 8441 kHz – 30 kHz
