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.
4CD – Domizil
Twenty years is not that long for a non-mainstream label such as Domizil, especially when no-one complains about the changing times. This is particularly the case when being forerunners and not followers, even if experimenting is not that popular in as difficult an age as the one we are living in. As a matter of fact, in the middle of the Nineties, a lot of musical trends had already developed while others were just starting to peek out, and digital electronic was about to fully develop widely and easily. It is then a valuable choice for this anniversary that the label founded by Marcus Maeder has avoided creating a celebrative anthology. It has preferred to do four individual issues among its most representative and active collaborators. Marcus Maeder’s own issue is the first one to be listened to in the CD player of the newsroom. From the very first sidereal notes it seems clear that the project is fascinating, floating, spaceful and extremely rich in vibrations and astronomic suggestions. In our opinion, Non.Human is pure science fiction, the last Utopic home-delivery developed from a home PC from literally one’s own domicilio. This already knowing that in a vacuum no sound can propagate and be caught by human ears. Also for Thomas Peter – Thornbill is the title of his work – inspiration comes from a rarefied and vibrational universe, with strong and improvised percussive features balancing the enigmatic and dull frequencies mixed to liquid field recordings and essential assonances. As for Bernd Schurer, the climax of Blind Material is immediately more eccentric and striking, packed with electronic hits and weird contractions which seem to be forerunners of the age of home-made computer-based music and are reminders of psychoacoustic seminal and the auditory experiments with synodal waves and analogic winces. Celebrations close up with Martin Neukom, whose sound flutters in “Studien 21.2-21.15” thanks to eight oscillators by Van De Pol (well-known tools in radio production) almost to remind us how labels are not only doomed to aesthetic, artistic and visive approach but also to a scientific one.
