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.
CD – Mego
Oren Ambarchi, Crys Cole, Will Guthrie, Arto Lindsay, Joe Talia, Ricardo Villalobos e Keith Fullerton Whitman senza ombra di dubbio danno vita a una collaborazione assai speciale e anticonformista, innervata da ritmi ripetitivi (probabilmente raccordati proprio dal maverick cileno, maestro di minimal e microhouse, artista originale in ambito dance-elettronico, famoso per le sue controverse performance, amato o odiato a seconda dei differenti palcoscenici). Per l’occasione le sequenze di Hubris – invece – vengono innestate da influssi krautrock e lampi schizoidi di blues, nonché da variazioni free form, sussulti questi ultimi che sembrano indotti dall’ex chitarrista no wave dei DNA. Le sonorità sono magistralmente dispensate nelle due lunghe pieces, “Hubris, Pt. 1” e “Hubris, Pt. 3, composizioni fra le quali è adagiato un interludio di due minuti, una sorta di ninna nanna ispirata e con frammenti vocali di una conversazione casuale. Il tutto sembra universalmente connettere bilanciate energie che fanno riferimento al minimalismo tradizionale, al jazz, al rock e alla musica elettronica. Infatti – non a caso – Oren Ambarchi, ebreo di origini irachene nato in Australia, è un multi-strumentista, un batterista solo di recente passato alla chitarra: il suo approccio sembra sviluppare una strategia collaborativa che ricorda mantra ipnotici (ricordate Steve Reich o La Monte Young?), una sorta di spaced out music ammendata per le nuove generazioni e ricca di sovrapposizioni ritmiche di cellule melodiche, passaggi lirici e contemplative atmosfere. Delle due lunghe suite la seconda è quella più “musicale” e dove il combo testa più raffinate contaminazioni, seppure a nostro avviso è la prima ad essere più cerebrale e rigorosa. Evidentemente è proprio questa la zona liminale ad essere esplorata, al confine tra improvvisazione e serialismo, drone e space music. Alla Mego di Peter Rehberg sono avvezzi a tali interconnessioni di generi e non deve nemmeno fin troppo stupire che il minimalismo krautrock sia sposato con guidati ritmi disco-funky e strati di bassi, lambendo il fuzzy e la psichedelia: a queste latitudini tutto può succedere e infine è bello perdersi anche in un ascolto scevro da troppa teoria, rincorrendo lo stesso gioioso spirito sperimentale che evampa dall’inconsueta ensemble.
