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.
60″ cassette – Helen Scarsdale Agency
Released under the insignia of the Helen Scarsdale Agency, this latest work by Radioson engages themes of global conspiracy implied in narratives such as those related to Area 51 or in reports on Roswell. The latter is a classic for UFOlogists but also the name of a teen drama that tells of a group of extraterrestrials that live incognito in New Mexico. References to parapsychological experiments of all kinds are not excluded: Radioson mixed everything embracing a total paranoid aesthetic experience, surrounded by the themes and suggestions of a psychic warfare and of “radio biological waves mental transmission”, themes from which the title of the project – радиосон – is inspired. Like many of the latest releases on this label, the sounds –dark, cyber and dystopian – see the light on a sixty minute cassette. In this case, however, the rumble of interference is further enhanced through the analog medium, both for the vintage suggestions of themes and for the intrinsic quality of the patterns, which at times grow very scuffed and enchanting. We are not even far from the cold wave except that the sequences here are particularly iterate and obsessive, with larval melodies that peep out only in track two, in our opinion the most significant and poetic of the whole album. The sounds produced cross genres and embody very different musical approaches, from ambient to rock and from glitch quietism to a sort of rarefied and minimal esoterica, in a distorted ecstasy of shortwaves and synthesizers. The list of the equipment used is worthy of note too: a reel to reel magnetophone Astra110, a Jupiter 203 stereo, a Uher 4200 Report, a Degen 1103, a Polivox, a Korg ESX and a Aiwa 929.
Radioson – радиосон | Helen Scarsdale
