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.
CD – Thrill Jockey
Emptyset, aka James Ginzburg and Paul Purgas, have published 7 LPs and an even larger number of single releases, EP, compilations and DJ mixes in the past decade. Blossoms, their second work on long form for Thrill Jockey, was developed over eighteen months, thanks to the partnership of an international network of software developers working on the cutting edge of sound synthesis. This partnership focused mainly on the generative aspects of the composition and on the basic characterisations, due to the organisation of complex and original audio structures. The dark and machinic settings refer to an almost impersonal creation, set by artificial neural networks and other abstruse and post-human synthetic pieces of equipment. On these aspects there is maybe a little bit of exaggeration, because a strong authorial and manipulative basis is undoubtedly present in the work. The tracks surely don’t originate all by themselves, because we are still far from a situation where “by pressing down a special key, it plays a little melody”, as Kraftwerk put it. Here there are no melodies and this is a conscious choice, the set of sound data is anyways well developed and we doubt that the connections between the sounds are merely the result of some alien, artificial intelligence. The hybrid and ever-changing sounds are combined with the addition of some well-synthesised audio pulses. They use some variegated echoes and beats, and yet there is an underlying purpose and design. There is some emphasis placed on the fact that according to different initial parameters, different unpredictable solutions are produced, but actually this is not perceptible through the sounds. The sounds seem to be spatially distributed, full of industrial references and with some echoes of vintage electroacoustic music. This duo is well established: James Ginzburg is the head honcho of Subtext, while Paul Purgas manages the Wysing Arts Center festival in South Cambridgeshire. Together they are definitely prepared to face their audience. Even if they prefer to mention their “automated” systems, behind everything there is just their unlimited creative and futuristic drive.
Emptyset – Blossoms
