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
The Australian sound artist MP Hopkins currently lives and works on aboriginal land, in New South Wales, a coastal area that according to the maps shouldn’t be so far from Sydney. Matthew Philip, (MP is the acronym of his two names) is interested in mixing many different languages, whose result leads to some unconventional and melancholic atmospheres. The base is a raw source of materials, later re-used to produce some sensitive electro-acoustic compositions. The Gallery Rounds, simply named G.R/S.S, was produced after recomposing different field recordings captured from some galleries, museums and other institutional buildings in Australia between 2014 and 2017. At first listening, the style shares a lot with the improvisation tradition. The studio work might be more meticulous, but it links together all the different suggestions, sometimes more thinned and unfocused on direct references to the places of capture. There is no conceptual relationship between the sounds and the artists shown in the spaces, or the subjects of the research. However, the attention on the many and less acceptable involuntary combinations was always high, for example the car traffic or the construction works in some areas fusing with the sounds of the video and the kinetic sculptures, or the daily human activities and the sounds of the buildings during events (shows, meetings or conferences), or other intrusions in the external spaces nearby. From some points of view, the choice of cultural institutions as places of capture doesn’t make much difference, if the main concept for the author was to give life to a sort of audio diary and highlight the hypothetical point of view of the listener/spectator, who is anyway a consumer. We got the feeling the work was somehow “romanticized”, sometimes engagingly, sometimes incompletely, with the aim of thinking about the nature of consumption. Behind all the elements, there is the very personal musical “taste” of the author, who combines together the different sessions and later recomposes them in an abstract and sensitive exchange.
The Gallery Rounds: Round 2 – The Gallery Rounds: Round 2
MP Hopkins – Round #2
