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 – Urbsounds Collective
Dead Janitor is the moniker hiding Brano Findrik, a Slovakian producer who here presents eleven tendentious compositions of dark contemporary IDM (intelligent dance music) for Urbsounds Collective. The tracks seem very harsh and suburban, but in some episodes they also resound with some futuristic dark, ambient, industrial and techno vision. The hybridization of many elements is effective and the sound development is overall influenced by a careful and complex application of the rhythmical structures. Medusa is the most engaging and radical work by Dead Janitor, the result of a journey began in 2008 with the album The Boring Structure and continued, before this last release, with the album Proximity, produced in 2016 by Strefa Szarej Records. Since then, Findrik has emphasized the electronic and experimental elements of his practice, combined here with more beats and a maniacal use of loops and extreme cuts. The climax is always high and a large part of these productions might be played in some creepy club focused on unconventional dance, dark minimalism or on trance. Perhaps not incidentally, 2016 is the year when the Urbsounds Collective opened to new partnerships and become an artistic promotion platform, with the idea that music is intrinsically a political and disruptive power. Welcoming an artist such as Dead Janitor follows this concept. His tendency to be critical about the current times can not be underrated, he is the harbinger of a raw and urgent dystopian message, always at ease even with the most audacious passages, full of breakbeats and shaking loops, overlapped in estranging musical caesura. The title of the album, Medusa, is a metaphor open to several interpretations. This mythological character with her own disorderly and aggressive aesthetics influenced different fields of mass culture. She is often depicted as the antagonist in novels, films, animation shows, role games and videogames. Dead Janitor made this choice inspired by the Clash Of The Titans, an action-adventure fantasy, with an indirect reference to hostility, something normalized in contemporary politics and culture.
Dead Janitor – Medusa
 
