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 project Biblioteq Mdulair – yes, that’s the way it’s written – has a setting made from 15 analogue generators played by the Swiss Emma Souharce and Daniel Maszkowicz. The two conceptual experimenters are also focused on searching some fertile audio-video interconnections. The analogue equipment is the result of specific research combined with a post-modernist bricolage attitude. The monitors, different in shape, typology and size are all cathode ray tube models. They seem to refer to a performance practice inspired by some underground theatre shows of the 80’s. This audio-visual electronic experience is apparently made without any use of software and computers and shows elements such as pointillism deconstructions, tickings and sibilant fluid impulses, trends almost impossible to perceive, with hypnotic and growing ambient resonances. This release was recorded live in Bruxelles at Cinéma Nova on December 10th 2017 and is a coproduction by Copypasta Editions ed Aussenraum Records, a label whose catalogue often includes works with a contamination between music and borderline arts. In this Primitive Electronics Brain Dance the authors recognize “a series of force pairs”, on sequence, “as melodies of heights and timbres on a side” and at the same time “a mechanism of vertical assembly works of the harmonic scans”. The sequences seem to follow an evolution which goes from the elemental into more complicated loops, until returning again to basic scans. From the first instruments of sound synthesis until now it’s always possible to perceive some silence behind the sound. This happens in the duo’s work too and refers at the same time to a deeply pacified musical attitude, but also proves the world is a representation which is beyond simple aesthetic contemplation. Frequency generators, filters, impulses, oscilloscopes in additive synthesis, this is the material played. Thanks to the live participation of Synkie – Max Egger, Michi Egge and Flo Kaufman – and their analogue ecosystem of manipulation, the style exercise becomes more dense and the impact with the audience even more powerful.
Biblioteq Mdulair – Primitive Electronics Brain Dance
Live at Cave 12 – Biblioteq Mdulair meets Synkie
