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.
24xCD (box set) – Baskaru
Frank Rothkamm’s conceptual excursions are consistently surprising. Last time it was Reno that made us jump, a muzak album that certainly does not occupy first place in the German composer’s discography. Prior to that release Rothkamm had been diagnosed with noise-induced tinnitus and this stimulated the eclectic researcher into investigating possible sound treatments for “masking” or removing high frequencies. He eventually had to admit defeat in the quest to find a cure, but Rothkamm has instead developed something he calls a “psychostochastic” scientific method. This is an innovative concept of “no-time music”, which uses statistical analysis to create sound that is difficult to remember and whose perception is affected by the type of iterations that constitute the music. The project has been released on the Baskaru imprint and includes twenty-four CDs, each lasting one hour and housed in a hand-made Lucite double box. The work forms “a zone where there is no beginning nor end, no linear development but the laws of quantum mechanics”. Given that the reference points here are sound, time and uncertainty, it is unsurprising that the title alludes to Norbert Wiener, a mathematician, statistician and one of the forerunners of information theory and cybernetics. Wiener Process begins with barely audible frequencies (below 1 kHz) that expand in complexity through formal probabilistic processes, adding elements and reaching an average rate of 277 sound events per second. The exponential multiplication of the sound data forces the listener into a dramatic metamorphic space, one much broader than is usually encountered. There is no escape: this work is bright and out of control. The method of construction forces us to consider the usefulness of critical judgements and (as with all generative music) question the role of the author.
Frank Rothkamm – Wiener Process (excerpt)
