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 – -OUS
The Swiss-Italian producer and artist IOKOI has her debut on long form with his new release Liquefy produced by -ous, a label whose catalogue moves from techno to experimental pop. Liquefy includes ten original versions, characterized by refined, stylish and glamourous electronic music, and by tense atmospheres, giving the listener an impression of dynamism and futurism. The video for “Body/Head” and the interviews the artist made about this new experience are clear too: IOKOI is very inspired by the immaterial world, formed by the usage of new media and the infinite connections typical of this digital age. “You have the feeling our virtual life might be more intense,” IOKOI says, but this might actually limit us in the physical reality, instead of opening new dimensions. The reference to the immaterial world is not purely ideal but fulfills a large part of the artist’s imagination. In fact, IOKOI often underlines that audio and video have the same importance in her production; that these two aspects cannot exist without each other. The work presents different references. The strict relationship between music and images reminds us of Huoratron (XXVI Crimes Of Love). From a musical point of view, it owes more to experimental trip-hop and to the experimental chanteuse (a genre history that moves from Laurie Anderson to Björk). IOKOI hypercyberrealism is yet again the representation of a charm for antithetical elements now perfectly combined, whose ultimate styling is not concerned any more with function, due to an excess of signs, theories, information and images. The listening experience is very pleasant; the voice is almost always quite filtered and follows a suggestive, delicate and evocative path. The artwork of Mathieu Missiaen is an integral part of the album too: it’s very refined, but at the same time seems more frozen and thorny. The album goes on between these opposite sides, following a balance among the many themes already analyzed, the trembling references to the contemporary age and a kind of pop pleasure. Finally, the work gives our synapses an impressive and sweetly maniacal feeling.
