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.
Neural #48 extra is Au Clair de la Lune – For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy limited edition “paper record” version by artist Kazuhiro Jo (only for subscribers for the printed magazine).
Title:
Au Clair de la Lune – For Édouard-Léon Scott and László Moholy-Nagy – (1860/1923/2014)
Author:
Kazuhiro Jo
“I have suggested to change the gramophone from a reproductive instrument to a productive one, so that on a record without prior acoustic information, the acoustic information, the acoustic phenomenon itself originates by engraving the necessary Ritchriftreihen (etched grooves).” (Moholy-Nagy, 1923)
In 1923 László Bauhaus master Moholy-Nagy made the above proposal to produce a record without inputting acoustic information. At the time, it was just a provocative idea. However, after 9 decades, we have realized the idea with the help of mature vinyl audio recording technology and current personal fabrication tools.
In this work, instead of using the vibrations of original sound, we computationally generate a waveform with a conventional graphics application (Adobe Illustrator). The waveform represents a french folk song “Au Clair de la Lune” which was also known as the oldest recorded sound by Édouard-Léon Scott in 1960. By engraving the waveform through a laser cutter on a wood, a vinyl cutter on a paper, or a hand and a cutter on this page, you could generate an acoustic phenomenon of the french song through your own record player.
Acknowledgements:
IAMAS, The OGAWA Science and Technology Foundation, JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number 24652029, and So Yamada.
References:
– Moholy-Nagy, L. New Plasticism in Music. Possibilities of the Gramophone, in Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier, eds., Broken Music. Artists’ Recordworks, Berlin: Berliner, Künstlerprogramm des DAAD and gelbe MUSIK, pp. 53-58 (1989). (Chapter originally published 1923.)
– Jo, K. The Role of Mechanical Reproduction in (What Was Formerly Known as) the Record in the Age of Personal Fabrication, Leonardo Music Journal, Vol.24, MIT press (2014). (to be published).
