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.
Traditional stage rhetorics often find themselves in an awkward place within academic electronic music. The modernist movement wiped the slate clean of the conventions that were made obsolete either by technology or the desire for a clear-cut break with the past. And when traditional stage rhetorics are indeed referenced in this domain, there is a high risk of populist and nostalgic if not gimmicky outcomes. Cathy van Eck’s Song No 3 is a short etude that establishes a brilliant synthesis in which formal electronic music meets the familiar gestural vocabulary of vocal performance, transforming both into something other. Considering the microphone and the loudspeaker as musical instruments in themselves, Cathy van Eck’s work investigates the multiple ways in which the body and gestures of the performer can effect the relationship between microphone and loudspeaker in order to produce different sonic outcomes. In Song No 3 the performer wears a speaker attached to the head in front of the mouth, with a sheet of paper attached around the speaker to conceal the face, and holds a microphone in one hand. The performance is centred on the histrionic movement of the arms and hands of the performer. While singers traditionally spread their arms to produce a certain emphasis (the singer is a musician and actor), here this conventional gesture becomes functional to alter the distance between the microphone and speaker. As the performer draws the microphone closer or further away from the mouth, the sound emitted by the speaker changes. The microphone is employed as a sensor to detect the amplitude of the sound emitted by the speaker at its relative distance. The amplitude level, which is picked up by the microphone, acts as a control signal for software parameters that determine the sound generation. The piece proposes a sequence of several different mappings between sound and gesture, which have the effect of constructing and then defying the expectations of the audience. Transcending the instrumentation employed, the figure of the masked and faceless performer emitting otherworldly sounds from the black hole of the mouth touches on deeply embedded archetypes. Matteo Marangoni
Cathy van Eck – Song No 3
