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/CDR + Book – Mimehaus
A new technology allows you to copy objects and people. We are in the field of science fiction, or, if you prefer, fiction science. Eric Lunde, whom we remember for Audio Demonstrations on Amalgamated Torso And Such, is an American musician and a very eclectic artist. Besides his musical releases and his artwork he has also published a book of poetry. Now at last he puts these complementary vocations together, creating a project part unconventional narrative text – a kind of “oblique” novel in the manner of William S. Burroughs (or Kathy Acker) – and part readings of the book on CD. These 518 pages are at the crossroads between art theory, poetry and sound research and the 10 recording are dense with contradictory suggestions, space-machinic impulses, industrial dizziness, sonic eddies and aural hyperboles. There are two CDs (a CD and a CDR) published by Mimehaus attached to this edition. The CD contains the readings, the CDR only the sounds used during the performance, which seems appropriate for this type of release. Lunde always has fun: in one section he threads a hip hop rap out of a puzzle of stinging abstract sounds. The book is also playful, with characters that alter in size and words that repeat for pages, culminating in a sort of “typography aphasia”, with letters partially deleted or barely recognizable. This is the first instalment of the Mimeoverse trilogy and is a work both cinematic in its scope and experimental in its pursuit.
