Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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.
CD – Aagoo
A marchio Aagoo Records e con un elettronica in definitiva abbastanza scarna ma avventurosa nonché piuttosto eclettica, torna Blevin Blectum, artista avvezza nel costruire sequenze soniche intriganti, per nulla convenzionali, abilissima nell’innescare citazioni ed influenze provenienti da più ambiti, vezzosa per vocalità e intrecci, in gran parte agitati in maniera davvero obliqua e bohémien. Questo Emblem Album è il quinto in solo per la compositrice multimedia, ben conosciuta anche per le collaborazioni con Kristin Erikson (come non citare il progetto Blectum from Blechdom), duo che è ancora attivisimo e si è esibito live, modulando le performance sia in coppia che singolarmente, proprio per la presentazione di questo album, serata conclusasi a Providence nel Rhode Island con la partecipazione speciale del fratello della signorina Bevin, Kelley Polar, a sua volta violinista classico, mente experimental e produttore, prestatosi per l’occasione al djing frattale. Partiamo negli ascolti da “Cromis”, prima traccia di fattura electro-techno, in guisa destrutturata e un po’ psichedelica, incisione zeppa di drum machine sempliciotte ma impazzite e passando per episodi maggiormente rarefatti e melodici, in guisa di gameboy elegiaci (in “Nanofancier”) o delle maggiormente ritmiche e intricate evoluzioni (in “Deathrattlesnake”) arriviamo con “Harpsifloored” nella seconda parte della proposta, che passa nelle partiture ad atmosfere ancora emozionalmente più dense e coinvolgenti. Astrazioni puriste e narrazioni personali sono sempre a stretto contatto ed è difficile discernere sulla mescola delle trame, anche quando fanno capolino elementi di musica da camera, in “Manners Melting”, prima che si volga al termine con la splendida “Sycamore Scarab”, delicatissima e fluttuante rêverie immateriale.
Blevin Blectum – Cromis Part One
