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 – Monochrome Vision
Benny Braaten, aka Origami Galaktika, has released a number of works since 1996 – LPs, double LPs, CDRs and CDs. Some of these have been self-produced while labels such as Speeding Across My Hemisphere, Black Orchid, Jester, Blade and Monochrome Vision have produced others. 021226 Beachland Ballroom, Cleveland, his penultimate work, is a live album from 2009. The relatively slow period since then doesn’t seem to have had any adverse effects on the Norwegian experimenter. One is divided into eight scores consisting of refined and inspired sequences that float in space, melding field recordings and electronically manipulated real instruments. It has an ambient quality but is not background music; there is a feeling of a contemporary space here amid the psychedelic beats. The music allows the author to express his taste for the meditative, presenting dreamy constructions filled with a neopagan religiosity and influenced by a vision of music as an occurrence. Everything is “one”, according to Eastern philosophies: the reciprocal connection between things is the engine driving our lives. Science, too, is interested in holistic visions of reality: from neurobiology to quantum mechanics, science provides some support to ideas that previously were only encouraged by the intuitions of artists and philosophers. However, the message of Origami Galaktika is spiritually clear, creating a bridge between old intuitions and contemporary awareness; a poetics developed with coherence and very few flaws, pleasant in its textures and unpredictable in its movements.
Origami Galaktika Live at K4, Praha
Origami Galaktika Live at K4, Praha from Per Åhlund on Vimeo.
