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 – Unsounds
The Body Imitates the Landscape is published by Unsounds, a label focused on sound art, contemporary composition and free form experimentation. The project was initially conceived as a sound installation by artist Adi Hollander. Hollander used different ergonomic instruments to transform the audio into vibrations that could be felt all over the body. The source of inspiration was the Japanese book Karada, published in 2011, where author Michitaro Tada explored “the body” in its different cultural manifestations, through memory, science, expression and daily life. The fundamental concept of the installation was an attempt to trigger the textual experience of the book by activating a broader sensorial engagement. The partnership with the composer Claudio F. Baroni and the ensemble Maze was fundamental to activate a specific space for the audience, made of 17 objects of different forms, with water beds, wooden benches and speakers with built-in translators. In this area, the spectator-performers can expand their hearing abilities by using different parts of the body and creating an intimate relationship with the objects, a kind of engagement similar to two people sharing a secret. The most auditory element is based on a whispering voice and some highly dilated sequences of electroacoustic and improvisational music. What we hear in the CD is only part of the broader structure the composers planned. Nonetheless, the eleven compositions have their own coherence. A certain range of attention is put into developing hidden harmonies existing in normal language, a sort of “speech without voice” supported by the musical instruments, with the high flute played by Anne La Berge, the vibraphone by Enric Monfort and keyboards by Reinier van Houdt, to mention a few names. The result is undoubtedly refined and demonstrates an intimate relationship between the audience, the sound and the objects in a soft and intriguing way, mysterious and narrative, with an original form.
Claudio F. Baroni – The Body Imitates the Landscape
