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.
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24.09.02 Trent Reznor, music and video games.
In a recent article for Salon.com Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails enigmatic leader tells how gaming elitist, whose practice becomes for him a moment of artistic research. With the curious name of 'Pooper Sniffer' Reznor is a fan of 'Return to Castle Wolfenstein' and "is interested in using the computer as a tool for recording / musical or artistic creation, not in the way the manuals describing the operation" . From when he was a dishwasher in the eighties, and his only recreation was a console with Asteroids entrance of the restaurant, Reznor felt that there was something in video games punk, expressed itself in the idea of breaking the rules and doing something never done before. So after having bought an Atari 2600, moved into a Commodore 64 learning to program it by myself. From there the step was short with a mac for which he recorded his first album symbolically intolato 'Pretty Hate Machine', a patchwork of industrial intricate songs that sold more than one million copies. With continuing with the experiments, the artist has also benefited from a malfunction of recording, burning inaudible sounds that the software used restuiva the morning after a thorough session. After meeting with the founders of id Software, that of Doom, to be clear, he composed the sound effects for Quake, but in 1999 during the recording of 'The Fragile' was overwhelmed by the infinite possibilities available up to that time and delegate other use of the software, harboring a strong sense of frustration over this. Now is composing the next album and the soundtrack for Doom III, while listening to country music from his iPod walking her dog. Even for him the obvious adage of the great artists is always valid "even though you can buy excellent software for $ 200, it is said that you will be able to make a great record."
