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.
Since embedded audio processing gained attention during the years preceding the introduction of smartphones, a number of projects have been developed that employ computational means to establish new relationships between mobile audio devices and the acoustic environment. A classic among these is Noah Vawter’s Ambient Addition, a device, presented as an alternative to the iPod, which employs real-time DSP filtering to transform noises from the surroundings into music. By channeling the processed sounds into the user’s headphones, it created a link between the “personal sound bubble” provided by mobile music players and nearby events. Tackling the same problem from a different angle, sound artist Alex Braidwood more recently presented an invention that is so technically simple it could have been produced a century ago. Noisolation is a wearable mechanical resonator that allows the sound of the environment to be filtered acoustically before reaching the ears. It consists of two copper pipes protruding from a pair of noise protection earmuffs. Valves fitted on the metal conducts open and close rhythmically, affecting the cutoff frequency over time. Beside its technical features, the most striking aspect of this contraption is its curious visual appearance, not so dissimilar from the rudimentary and mysteriously fascinating acoustic locators employed for aircraft detection by pre-WWII armies. Like the former, Noisolation literally presents itself as a medium that extends the human body. As a low-tech relative of its computational counterparts, it also shows how sometimes a successful, but visually inexpressive media-design concept, can be given a highly iconic form. There is a qualitative difference involved in the process that becomes especially evident when the device is worn in the open spaces of the city, effectively turning the act of listening from a private activity into a public statement. To the point that even a regular television reporter can be compelled to discuss the noises of the city in terms of aesthetic experiences.
Matteo Marangoni
