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 – Sub Rosa
The legendary Pauline Oliveros recently passed away and Four Meditations e Sound Geometries has been one of her last releases: two long suites, more than twenty minutes the first, almost twenty-six the second. The first is the result of research carried out between 1991 and 1995, the second dates to 2003. Both the compositions are recorded by Andy Robbins and played with Musiques Nouvelles, a Belgian band run by the cellist Jean-Paul Dessy. After an immediate listening, apparently the approach is based on the free improvisation and on the sounds of the acousmatic tradition. From the first track, a studio-performance, we highlight the moving and feisty breaks and the voice of Ione. The artists are requested to pay attention on listening “before playing”. Obviously, according to the free form tradition, “listening” means the whole inclusion of anything played and finding a space for any sound which is played. As a result, in the moment a sound is produced, the sound runs and somehow changes the space too. The three-dimensional core of this experimentation is even more clear in Sound Geometries, the most recent composition, divided into three sections: “Contemplative: Into the Dreaming”, “Travelling by Any Means: Walking, Running, Floating, Swimming, Flying” and “Arriving Anywhere, Nowhere, Somewhere”. The titles are also interpretative metaphors to run the musicians over the emotional passages and dispositions, having the goal of creating a different atmosphere according to any section. The sounds are captured in direct drive by the microphones Oliveros skillfully set in ten “geometrical patterns”, a set-up named Expanded Instrument System (EIS). This set-up was specifically created to move and transform the sound in the space with audio surround 5.1 techniques. Todor Todoroff was called to coordinate the electroacoustic and IT expressions of this system, while Stephan Moore had the task to write some Max/MSP patches. The final result is amazing: in spite of her age, after a career literally made of sound, Oliveros kept the freshness and the coherence typical of her pioneering and epochal experimentation of the 60’s till the end.
Pauline Oliveros + Musiques Nouvelles – Four Meditations / Sound Geometries
