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 – Sumtone
The duo formed by Philipp Lamprecht and Anne-Suse Enflle, a combo accustomed to a dynamic mixture of contemporary and ancient music, is this time supported by two young Austrian composers – Marco Döttlinger (drums) and Jürgen Neuhofer (recorder). This collaboration has given life to a charming electroacoustic hybrid: the virtuosity of the duo is enriched by poignant compositional elements throughout the five tracks. Döttlinger wrote four of the tracks with Neuhofer contributing the remaining piece – a substantial composition of more than twenty minutes. Sumtone are well-versed in the current trends of contemporary classical music, and in particular the relationship between traditional instruments and live electronics. In this work the lively and reactive balance of elements is yet another expression of the label’s high artistic standards. The passages never surrender to easy manneristic solutions and from the first the listener is involved in the culmination of the project. The restless and restrained sonorities outline uninhabitable and sidereal landscapes, gradually giving way to improvised and acyclic modulations. Döttlinger’s compositions are closed and one piece is given over entirely to the bass recorder. Neuhofer’s track is a bit more choral and is characterized by grander phrasing of elements, but the atmospheres remain tense and congealed. In spite of these descriptions, the overall listening experience is not punitive, with an enduringly alluring continuum that maintains an inner coherence, strengthening the individual sequences.
Duo Enssle Lamprecht – jeuX
