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.
Aeolian instruments create an atmosphere that can be eerie, entrancing or foreboding, giving wind currents a resonant voice. Wind harps that appeared to be played by invisible spirits created the first ambient music. Singing kites have carried whistles and flutes into the atmosphere long before anyone had experienced the roar of propellers and jet engines. Pulsar Kite is an electronic musical instrument made by Juan Duarte Regino which makes possible new kinds of sonic interactions with the wind, bringing computer music out into the open and exposing it to the elements in a playful and physically engaging way. Pulling and releasing the lines of a kite becomes not only a way for the body to negotiate the invisible and chaotic forces of the atmosphere, but also a way to interface the body and the environment with the domain of computation. Airborne sensors attached to the kite gather data on speed, rotation and elevation of the aircraft. The data is transmitted wirelessly to a computer on the ground where it seeds a software based on the pulsar synthesis method developed by Curtis Roads and Alberto de Campo, which is used to process ambient sounds picked up by a microphone. Various mappings allow either for immediate cause and effect reactions, magnifying changes in speed and acceleration and enhancing the vertiginous acrobatics of the kite, or alternatively for slower evolutions of the musical material, in which the data is used to feed the variations of a generative process. Pulsar Kite adds a perceptual layer to the experience of flying a kite, integrating a synthesized aural layer into the visual and haptic experience of tracking and steering the aircraft, effectively applying music and technology as vehicles to mediate between human activity and the natural environment. Matteo Marangoni
Pulsar Kite
