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 – Karaoke Kalk
When we first listen to the first part of The Sea is Never Full, we soon feel that this is a classical remembrance and holy composition, with piano weaves and sequences run by experimental and free improvisation guitar developments and the use of chordophones, strings and bass. The atmospheres are dark but not too insisting and extreme, though later they get more raw. The reason is a cathartic proof of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan, where the Dakota Suite were on tour during the days of the epic catastrophe. The Dakota Suite are made by Chris Hooson and David Buxton and often feature different artistic partnerships for their works: this time they worked with the Vampillia, an alternative Osaka band which usually shows a creative chaos full of free-form suggestions. The contribution of the Japanese band here is important to add the scores an orchestral sign. Despite the work with the Vampilla already starting some months before Fukushima, obviously the emotional impact due to the disaster is the work’s core: the devastating sense of loss, the feeling of helplessness, the different phases of the tragedy, the powerful images of death and sufferance of the survivors (some pieces of wood float over the water, the mind goes to the idea these were parts of some old dwellings of the disaster victims). The sea has always been a main inspiration for the artists: here this element is even more significant, due to the tsunami shock wave, the spread of the radiation, the disease trail the nuclear disaster left. The sea has always been able to absorb anything, however the music cannot define this fullness but just give some parts, only the scoria and the debris, some shocks and emotions hardly contained. Rather than melodic, this is a tonal song, a Japanese throat song called rekukkara, an ancient technique which is the most significant moment of this dramatic audio choreography. The song reminds us, in an unconventional way, of some funeral elegies from the western tradition. These lyrical expressions can go beyond the distances of space, time and culture. In this case they pay something to their own matter, which is already infected and destined to a slow and irreparable degradation process.
