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 – 12k
This is the fourth full-length album in ten years for the Australians Kane Ikin and Paul Fiocco, aka Solo Andata, an experimental combo that now returns to 12K after a first experience on Hefty Records and recent release on Desire Path Recordings. The two albums in the middle were for the New York-based label Seaworthy, with the head honcho Taylor Deupree, in 2008, and their namesake Solo Andata the following year. The border zone where the duo moves is that of a refined post-rock, quiet and contemplative, a stylistic context here marked with near-broken acoustic instruments on which to experiment with cheap microphones and any other equipment to be modified in order to create unconventional sounds. They embrace a certain raw and innocent sound quality, often disregarded in much of the current over-produced music. In the Lens takes this spirit and in some way also reassembles the fragments, annexing old recordings, samples and dusty arrangements. The result is a clean sweep of all conceptual superstructure, highlighting its ethereal passages and melodies, suspended between folk and jazz, with carefully studied lullabies and piano iterations, in sequences that have a strong narrative structure. Ikin and Fiocco are skilled at unravelling the sonic continuum and in the thirteen tracks more environmental sequences, acoustic and electronic evolutions, beat and frequencies, improvisational cuts and parts subject to heavy manipulations come to the fore. However, in their collaborations the two musicians have always privileged loosely structured and pre-arranged sessions.
Solo Andata – In The Lens
