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 – 1000füssler
The first track of the latest release by Gregory Büttner for 1000füssler – Wenn uns jemand hört – sag – wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt – re-proposes a special composition for the eponymous show by Anja Winterhalter, performer, photographer and dramatist who has for several years made Hamburg her base. Track 2 comes from another collaboration with Winterhalter and the audioplay/installation Echolot 1# Skipping Spaces. In this piece, audio sequences constructed by a machine vibrating sine waves, white noise and digital crackles were directed at specially prepared objects (e.g. cans, tubes and wooden boxes) in order to create and mix ‘metallic’ and sibilant feedbacks together. The effect is soft, acoustic and organic-sounding reverberations. The samples were then re-recorded to produce a mixture of fairly detailed and immersive sequences, dense in their infinitely small variations. Scalic jumps overlap and intertwine semi-chaotically, while always respecting a subtle harmony steeped in the electroacoustic tradition of which Gregory Büttner is a connoisseur. It should be noted that the original project of the first piece came about in 2010 and in 2011 Büttner also presented a live show with the same title at the Stark Bewölkt, a space dedicated to experimental music in Hamburg, in an ‘audio only’ production. The artist is – in short – back on the scene with this powerful and consistent release. The moods are sometimes extreme but they delicately stimulate our attention to detail with a slow expansion of treatments and atmospheres. This is a very interesting work that reconciles us with more experimental and abstract sounds.
Gregory Büttner – Wenn uns jemand hört – sag – wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt
Gregory Büttner – Wenn uns jemand hört – sag – wir haben einfach kurz Luft geschnappt (Excerpt)
