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.
Vinyl – Not On Label
It gradually grows up, like a sizzle, it seems there are some field recordings of natural sources, maybe bats, or rodents, or crows, and there are also tweets, cracklings, buzzes and clicks, followed by a silent, yet penetrating, hum. FoAM is an independent institution in Bruxelles. Nik Gaffney and Maja Kuzmanovic are two of its founding members. In Dust & Shadow the two artists quote the Portuguese artist Fernando Pessoa. The description seems to perfectly fit: “All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons”. The dust is everywhere, because any thing is its source. The artists add to every vinyl a little bag of dust, sand and detritus drawn from the Sonoran, Mojave and Great Basin deserts. They suggest this organic material might be used along with the vinyl for further physical manipulation, which would be otherwise incomplete without the surface noise and the divergence from the recorded sound matter. This production was made in partnership with Desert Humanities and the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University. The project was also supported by the Global Institute of Sustainability, the Institute for Humanities Research and the Panpsychic Development Fund. The desert lands are full of activities and filled by a whisper, which is continuous, but perceptible only by whoever is able to catch the most minimal hints. The duo uses a Sennheiser AMBEO VR for audio recordings, an ultra-professional microphone with four KE 14 capsules on tetrahedron configuration, but also some simple mobile phones, computers and unbranded contact microphones, a pair of RØDE M5s and one Zoom-H6. In addition, they use many kinds of software: Ardour, Audacity, Supercollider, anything that they might find helpful to catch and edit the atmosphere and the emotions a location can evoke, while the dust inexorably settles and the owls andthe coyotes are made unrecognizable. There are only two tracks each about 18 minutes long, but we also need to mention the edition of three books, contained in a cover-map of the locations, separated from the album release and divided into reader#1, reader#2 and fieldnotes. This is definitely a brilliant and exceptional release.
FoAM – Dust & Shadow
