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 – Baskaru
In Nouvelles Upanishads Du Yoga Emmanuel Allard has played around with different sound sources and a modular system called Buchla 200e, a new generation synthesizer well known among lovers of experimental electronics. This unusual tool is highly versatile and was inspired by the classic analogue systems of the 70s. The French artist has been active in the non-mainstream Parisian scene for more than twenty years, creating installations and performances in art galleries, clubs and museum – but till now, only one album: Imite Moi, released in 2003 for Dorondine under the cryptic moniker of “Fabriquedecoleur”. Using a reduced setup, Allard is now more focused on sounds and frequencies, creating occasional ambient patterns and reactions between glitches and effects. The work contains some abstract and ethereal passages that do not feel too separated from the moments of synthetic abuse via abrasive resonances, hisses and crackles, feedback and subtractive noise. The combination and the overlapping of elementary sound particles induce the listener to focus on the similarities and contrasts in the sounds. Extricating oneself from the textures requires embracing the radicality of the author’s intentions, which are never comprised nor reduced to a quietist aesthetic. Buzzes, continuous tones, audio emergencies and harsh, strangled sounds sit alongside veiled melodies and metallic winces. Audiences will decide whether to indulge or reject this approach but we think that this production may be a starting point for questioning the adequacy and necessity of the avant-garde today. This unusual and highly “avant-garde” music requires total surrender, but at the same time eschews any abstruse conceptualization.
Emmanuel Allard-Nouvelles Upanishads du Yoga-SÈance(excerpt) [Baskaru]
