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.
Shake Underground Editions, ISBN 8888865098 archeology of the imaginary electronic Kraftwerk surely occupy a very prominent: this is, of course, beyond the scoop itchy awakened from a biography of controversial and not very benevolent towards fellow adventurers, the greatest appeal of 'I Was A Robot', the debut of Wolfgang Flür, one of the four members of the legendary percussionist and band in Düsseldorf. Versatile artists, experimenters, by the merits too obvious, after having impressed beyond their insights and personal skills the evolution of genres, in the transition from rock-hard to the first stirrings of digital, the influence of the Teutonic quartet was decisive especially in the graft in the major American cultural birth, seminal for the future styles already in intangible technology really began to mix sounds and not just theories (albeit well-designed and necessary in the beginning). As almost always happens in such epochal transitions, it is difficult to stay in the center of the storm, the years of silence the group become too many, understanding the times have appeared (also thanks to its contribution) is not always lucid, come the inevitable crisis and the subsequent breakages. Even the history of technopop has its ghosts in the closet and in the 'desired encounter between man and machine is certainly not the first of the two components to arouse greater admiration. Flür is a sympathetic villain shaking his undoubted emotional reasons tapping more keys, interspersing the record of the time (when success was mounting) and the memory of the following years, until his last engagement with Yamo, stirring reflections family, memories and hopes . Kraftwerk at the Film Festival in Venice, in 1978, that fight with Julio Iglesias and dance with Ian Dury, the advances of Helmut Berger in Rome, the birth of the first rudimentary drum machine, the relationship with their parents, love, themes in short by robots 'sorry', underlined by the notes ideally hypnotic 'Trans Europe Express' and 'Authobahn' that still resonate in my head there at the thought of their faces pale with cropped hair and sideburns straight, after the hangover of the children of flowers. We are the robots, mom, time changes everything.
