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 – Moozak
Sono assai dense e rarefatte evoluzioni cinematiche quelle che Martin Kay, aka Mountain Black, dipana in questo Closing In, suo album di debutto che vede la luce per la Moozak, label experimental fondata nella primavera del 2008 a Vienna, organizzatrice dell’omonimo festival, giunto oramai alla terza edizione e focalizzato su audio, visual e installation art, con numerosi live, video, letture ed opere fruibili dal pubblico. Pure se l’ispirazione risiede in maniera esplicita nella fascinazione per le colonne sonore e gli immaginari filmici, l’autore s’impone di depurare le sequenze da qualsiasi contesto specifico, prendendo le distanze da particolari referenze visive o narrazioni, approcciando alla composizione quindi in maniera alquanto aperta e astratta. Se pure l’intero progetto è infarcito da numerose field recording, i suoni e i luoghi utilizzati, sottolinea l’artista, non sono di alcun significato particolare e sembrano invece dettare il catalogo delle sequenze sia l’esclusivo gusto per alcune atmosfere, sia le soluzioni e il metodo sfaccettato, che interpretano lo spazio a partire dalle ossessive fascinazioni sonore dell’autore, zeppe di droni elettronici, fruscii e gorgoglii, emergenze glitch e sussulti auditivi di varia natura. Il climax è altalenante ed entrano in gioco molti elementi apparentemente senza connessione alcuna ma sempre organici al continuum delle evoluzioni, parti che mai sono organizzate per dar vita a cesure nette oppure per essere disturbanti nelle contrapposizioni. Indiscutibile è la qualità sonora agita nella complessità delle trame, seppure il sound design depurato da ogni approccio tematico e site-specific a molti risulti discutibile, un po’ altezzoso e autorale nel caso non innesti soluzioni totalmente nuove.
Mountain Black – Closing In / Album Promo Snippets
