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.
12” – Lomechanik | Esc.rec. | Shipwrec
The name The Void* (pronounced “The Void Pointers”) is a tribute to the C ++, programming language, whose semantics are relatively minimalist but also versatile, power and recursive. Similarly composite, this trio – which is formed by Roald van Dillewijn, Tijs Ham and Eric Magnée – is a strong wall of sounds made of modified instruments and electronics but also of elegant layers, cuts and melodic, iterated and dissonant sequences. The basic approach is mostly post-rock but the unusual combo also recovers a free form attitude, with soundscapes and suggestions of serial and classical music. The contrast is that of an organic sound with one that is abstract, aestheticised but rich in dilated and mesmerising moments. Even the artwork of the vinyl release follows this inspiration, with a hardcover matte pierced in circular and geometric openings of various sizes that show a coloured texture below. This album by The Void* is linked simultaneously to three labels: Lomechanik, Esc.rec and Shipwrec, all “made in the Netherlands”. The band is also involved in the modifying some instruments (guitars and flutes) in order to create unconventional sonorities. The release consists of six tracks, the first very environmental and insistent, shaped by a guitar drone and radio frequencies, spurious elements and effects. In the next the piano is in evidence, in a very melancholic and rarefied, suspended and intimate way, while the third shows off experimental orchestrations, a sonic pointillism then diverted in meditative conjunctions and chamber music influences. “Abstract” is more electronic, martial and disturbing, while “E AB EF B” is still a stylised piano composition just furrowed from other layers of swirls and hums. With “Dereference”, which starts almost silent, The Void* recalibrate the focus on the infinitesimal, closing the album beautifully and leaving us in fascination aroused by so many multiform expressions.
The Void* – Values
