Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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 – D’Autres Cordes
Elettronica, elettroacustica, noise e musica contemporanea: questa è la speciale mescola che Franck Vigroux alimenta in Rapport Sur Le Désordre, produzione comprensiva di quattro tracce per lato, un’ideale proseguimento di Centaure, performance audio-visual messa in scena con Kurt D’Haeseleer, producer video e fondatore del Werktank (una sorta di factory avanguardustica dedicata alla new media art). Centaure e Rapport sur le Désordre sono i capitoli finali di una lunga e consistente serie sugli immaginari distopici, tema al quale il compositore, musicista e performer, pare assai legato e che in passato lo ha visto protagonista in altre delle sue innumerevoli uscite (sono ben sedici, complessivamente, gli album licenziati dal transalpino fra produzioni soliste e progetti di altra natura). Vigroux, che ha collaborato anche con Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic) e Matthew Bourne (pianista e compositore altrettanto appassionato d’elettronica analogica e atmosfere rarefatte), infonde in queste sue piece futuribili un equilibrio decisamente inconsueto, pregno d’altalenanze ma infine coerente e molto intenso negli effetti, che sono dispensati in trame suggestive e mai banali, così come la complessità degli intrecci, che sorprende positivamente, catalizzando all’ascolto grazie ad una ipervivida tensione, ricca di stimoli auditivi e di fervida immaginazione narrativa. La propensione cinematica è palpabile in questo solo apparente “disordine”e altrettanto la ricerca di un adeguato climax: la “sintonizzazione” viene attivata facendo leva su toni più “apocalittici” che “integrati”, seppure nel gioco delle parti ancora una certa emozione metropolitana è meticciata da un approccio piuttosto esclusivo e imprevedibile, attento ai dettagli ma non civettuolo e nemmeno alla ricerca di troppo facili consensi. È un album volutamente contraddittorio ma ricco di nuance, Rapport Sur Le Désordre, che non poteva che confermare gli intenti più volte dichiarati dalla stessa DAC Records (D’Autres Cordes), etichetta di casa nel cui catalogo è stata presentata l’opera, a conferma dell’efficacia e della passione per la commistione di più elementi stilistici e “trans-disciplinari”.
