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 – Terziruolo
“The future is a monotonous instrument”, said Francis Picabia, imagining an instrument that nearly always preserves the same tone, repeating it at regular intervals. In 333 Loops Emiliano Romanelli has explored the motto of the surrealist painter and poet, recording a series of sound events using a modular system homonymous with the title of this album. The result is an immersive, persuasive and spiritual work that is easy to dive into. The Città Sant’Angelo (Abruzzo, Italy) native developed the system from 333 pre-recorded sound loops, taken from an archive created between 2008 and 2011. The archive contains sounds produced by software synthesizers that were played in different acoustic environments and recaptured by a variety of microphones and digital recorders. This is the second release by the Terziruolo label and Romanelli’s first solo album. It documents a live quadraphonic performance that took place in the medieval courtyard of the Ex Convento dei Cappuccini (a former monastery) of Colli del Tronto, as part of the Within 01 Festival (Sept 2013). Romanelli, who was once an active member of Tu M’ with Rossano Polidoro, has experience working with environmental implanting and loop-based editing (see for example Monochromes Vol.1 for LINE). The emotional and ethereal passages of the work are even cleaner here, thanks to meticulous mastering by Giuseppe Ielasi, another composer and sound manipulator very much appreciated in the international scenes. We should also mention Fabio Perletta, who joined the project as photographer and shot an interesting photo for the cover in the botanical garden of the Ex Convento.
Emiliano Romanelli – 333 Loops (Volume 1) – Excerpt # 1
