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 – Chmafu Nocords
TH_X brings together sound artist Daniel Lercher and experimental Norwegian trombonist Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø , combining free electroacoustic improvisation and digital electronics. The five scores (“A”, “B”, “C”, “D” and “E”) were composed for performance at a number of concerts that took place in Trondheim in 2011. The tracks were later revisited and recorded to be part of the Chmafu Nocords catalogue. Eccentric multiform treatments have been developed that make use of high-level instrumental technique, subtle drones and skillful manipulation of caesuras and sonic environments. Lercher’s homemade software has an influence over the whole production, especially in the alternating minimalistic elements; the quiet, suffused sounds, the contrast between different layers and the soft fades. The work is dreamy and cinematic, yet enveloping and prickly. The sine waves and the low emissions of the wind instruments converge in a charming continuum, filled with abstract electronics: the twists are dark but not penitential, simultaneously noisy and elegant. The software was made in such a way as to analyze the sound spectrum of the trombone in real time and then operate sine waves, resonators and filters, resulting in two independent sound sources that almost converge in unison. The procedure also leaves space for spontaneous interventions, with the aim of creating a silent intensity and harmonic balance with the chaotic and unpredictable elements. This album transports us to places that dreamy, enveloping, enchanting and placid.
Daniel Lercher & Henrik Munkeby Nørstebø – TH_X B
