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.
CD – Nux Org
Edging: Soundtrack For Dance Theatre Piece, with choreography by Guillaume Marie/TAZCORP, was released to coincide with the preview of the same piece at the Festival Les Inaccoutumés in Paris, on November 19th and 20th 2013. The musical atmospheres are dark, industrial and luxurious, recalling slightly apocalyptic and involving machinic progressions that are charming in their raging sense of the “end of time and history”. Kazuyuki Kishino is not new to electronic noise experimentation and he has played and worked with a lot of different artists and composers. The label, Nux Org (active since 1985), has a roster that includes several such artists: Melt-Banana, Merzbow, Fred Frith, Jim O’Rourke, plus several groups that feature KK NULL (Zeni Geva, Absolut Null Punkt, Terminal HZ, Yona-Kit, etc). The score projects an overflowing sensory experience, lit by enchanted movements that forecast a fervid transformation that is imminent but constantly deferred – a futuristic frontier weaving between desiring bodies and visceral fluctuations. The elaborations have a great power of attraction: the drones imprint on the skin, as if marks from ligatures kept too tight, while references to an out-of-reach sexual climax are used intentionally to multiply the strength of the impulses. Guillaume Marie and TAZCORP have long been creating partnerships between dancers and musicians (for example the performance inspired by Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious), but here the relationship between the different contexts is really tense, thanks KK’s consistent, cohesive and mysterious treatment.
KK NULL – Edging: Soundtrack For Dance Theatre Piece
