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 12″ – Gruenrekorder
Contact microphones are the tools used by Michael Lightborne, positioned close to the concrete pylons supporting the Coventry Ring Road, the huge dual-carriageway flanking the hometown of Delia Derbyshire. The road was built between the 1950s and the 1970s and is nowadays held up as a classic example of failed urban planning, a barrier that has effectively prevented the expansion of the centre. The road, hated by pedestrians has sparked interventions since 1988 by the City Council to recreate the connections between the heart of the town and its surrounding areas. Now the process of disassembly, mitigation and reuse of the structure is underway and Lightborne, almost to emphasise the outcome, immediately grasped the “melancholy” aspect of the structure’s sounds, a modernist monument that recalls certain Ballardian dystopian settings. If the first track is a collage of field recordings from around the Ring Road, almost a catalog of the available sounds, the following tracks develop these audio samples in an even more poetic way. “Fortran”, for example, is captivating, disturbing and deep, a slow suck into the most foggy and restless metropolitan spleen imaginable, so “Ring Road Reprise”, which lasts just over two minutes, stands out clearly as a psychic immersion into the neurosis of a motorist in the throes of nocturnal disorientation. In “Moebius Loop” it is the sensation of the “whirlpool” that reigns supreme, an obstruction that surrounds – and not only metaphorically – the social body of the whole town. “Gordian Knot” displays a continuous drone, at times metallic, bubbling softly, a sequence that at other times also sounds like rain. “Shepherd Tone” is a missed acceleration, a grammelot, a language of mechanical fantasy for which the intonation and the typical cadences are those of a liminal space. The last track of the album, which enriches the already remarkable Gruenrekorder catalog, is “Ring Cycles”, a score that includes recordings of the electromagnetic fields that surround and emanate from the ring road, driven by the traffic that passes above in an aggregation of psychogeographic sounds and suggestions.
Michael Lightborne – Ring Road Ring
