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.
LP – Bin
Jonas Olesen is a Danish experimental composer and the coordinator of the Scandinavian education plan on sound art at Nordic Sound Art. He is back again with the home label BIN and his new album, which it might be defined as “analog-anthological”. TEST features some source material, taken from a number of historical test records, and some psycho-acoustical demonstration recordings, including additional parts generated with a LEADER LFG-1300S Function Generator, and processed by an Phillips ISP 5021 Sound Enhancer. There are 32 tracks, seven of them on vinyl A, the remaining ones on vinyl B. Some tracks are tests: for example, “Sine Wave Sweep”, which is a series of frequencies normally used to check the feedback and the resonance of the environments, and “Room Exciter [Acoustic Metronome, 4 Combined Tempos] Noise Colours [Repeated]”. The tracks also include some simulated tinnitus sounds derived from The British Tinnitus Association (tinnitus seems to be a recurring theme for a generation of musicians grown up with electronics, high-volume headphones and exorbitant sound-system sets). However, the mix of signals and frequencies is difficult to understand. What does Jonas Olesen actually play and what is a simple audio document faithfully repeated? When can a specific choice and a series of sound samples be considered a form of artistic editing? Can the enigmatic simulation of the “test record” format be called a new media art and an unconventional expression? Jonas Olesen underlines that “it’s a game between the original material and the dry aesthetics of these sounds”, a technical and apparently little charming crossroad between music and original audio sources. He is interested in the duality and in the possible interaction with psycho-acoustic demonstrative signals, which are the elements considered within a landmark of collection and classification. The human ear is able to hear the sounds within a range between 20Hz to 20 kHz, obviously there are sound tests to verify this, but the most difficult thing is the challenge to the creativity and to the complex motivations and poetic interconnections of a sound-artist.
Jonas Olesen: TEST – Sweet Metro [Synthetic Formant Enhancement]
Jonas Olesen: TEST – Disclaimer [Morse code]
