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.
Kyle E Evans’ oscillographic synthesizer, the de/Rastra, consists of a circuit-bent CRT TV linked to a computer running a MAX/MSP patch to enable discreet cross-wiring of audio and video signals. The chassis of the TV has been modified to incorporate a gestural interface, using an accelerometer and force-sensing resistors, so that it can be played as an instrument. The movement of the TV in space combined with interface interaction allows Kyle to perform a range of oscillographic visualisations of sound – from simple sine waves through to complex Lissajous curves. There is a cyclic information flow between the analogue and digital parts of the system. First CRT sensor data is sent to the MAX patch, which interprets the data and transforms it into an audio signal. Then the acoustic signal is amplified and sent back to the CRT allowing for the generation of precisely synchronised oscillographic animations. The transmutation of obsolete and antiquated technology, such as the cathode ray tube, into new audio visual tools with capabilities alien to their original utility is a key aspect in Kyle’s projects and methodology. According to Kyle ‘In its modern character, seen as a combination of both archaic and nostalgic, the CRT is granted its most potential for experimentation and techno-resurrection. By way of building, bending and mutilating, de/Rastra shows the effects of altering the anatomical make-up of a CRT television, revealing the intrinsically hidden potentials of the technology through the re-purposing and restructuring of its own ability’. In the mid 1960s and onwards, Nam June Paik used magnets to bend cathode ray beams to create aberrant visualisations in well-known works such as “Magnet TV”. Earlier in the 1950’s Ben Laposky utilized oscilloscopes as the creation medium for his “Electronic Abstractions” and in doing so coined the term Oscillons. Evans’ work is founded on and informed by both of these artists. He expands on this oscilloscope lineage by fusing analogue and digital components to create sophisticated synaesthetic performative systems.
Paul Prudence
de/Rastra – Oscillographic Synthesizer and Computer Interface
