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 – Mikroton
This release by the label Mikroton, an artistic platform focused on electronic experimental music and mixed instrumental media, includes different recordings. Some of them were made in a nuclear power plant and some in an old water tower, while others were recorded at an exhibition of Johannes Heuer. All the elements were performed live, recorded and then mixed in the studio of Christoph Amann. The Bakery originates from a residence project of the Swedish Council of Culture in 2013. The experimenters Martin Küchen and Keith Rowe took part in the event and made two different suites of twenty-one and fourteen minutes. Martin Küchen is an improvisatory free-jazz saxophone player; Keith Rowe shares his musical side too and is a tabletop guitarist. It’s not the first time they have together made some fruitful works (for example, the former combo project with the free form saxophonist Seymour Wright.) Mutual knowledge and a similar sound approach help to make the sequences strong. They are homogeneous and coherent in their development. The sequences’ sophistication makes the listener involved in the continuum of hum, drones, field recordings and bare audio abstractions. At first listening, because the sequences are so well mixed, it’s hard to recognize the individual contributions. The overlaps of the first track are more evident, due to the dark and rarefied sounds progression made of different electronic overlaps and samples. The atmosphere seems reminiscent of a desert universe. In the following track, Rowe and Küchen keep the same attitude: the sequence is full of buzzes, strange scrapings, point-like samples and structural tensions. Despite the weaves being introvert in their essences, the listening experience is always interesting. The listener’s attention is held, due to the high quality of the sound combinations and to the undeniable charm of the duo’s manipulations.
