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 – Denovali
Behind the moniker of Ensemble Economique there is the Californian Brian Pyle and soon our memory goes to his project Starving Weirdos, featuring Merrick McKinlay. He is a very prolific artist: his career started already more than ten years ago, with more than fifteen albums already released, all of them characterized by ambient and drone music, dream-pop echoes and sweet electronics manipulations. In his last work In Silhouette the first track, “In The Clear Blue Waters Of Memory”, soon shows some dilated and synthetic sequences. The track was also featuring Jung An Tagen, that is Stefan Kushima, whose production always presents some hallucinated and crosscut inspiration, like in this track too. The storytelling is fluctuating, dark and suspended, full of elliptic drones, as in “Battle Cry” or hit by a voice full of effects and whispers, as in “Gonna Get Right With God, Right After This Next Cigarette”, a track inspired by a mysterious, noir and hypnotic charm, vaguely post-apocalyptic and space. “I Can See The Light, The Edge Of Forever” is more naif and western-style, reminding us some Morricone compositions. This track too presents a whispered tune and a simple melody, a little bit sick and obsessive. “You In The Horizon” is the last track: a Gainsbourgh style score, which sounds contemporary and abstract due to elements as sideral slowdowns, well-structured iterations and nightly winces and is full of movie soundtracks suggestions and dark-wave references. Bryan Pyle uses few elements but is able to fully involve the listener: his work goes beyond the dichotomies minimalism-maximalism, harmonies-dissonances, project-improvisation. In this moment of great style confusion, this is already something. From the experimental enclaves we expect they go beyond the genres and the poetry, and this is usually their main aspect but here we find an authentic talent, maybe not for everybody, who surprises us for his simplicity. The album was released by Denovali, a label which recently is producing many works. The label catalogue includes both niche and less extreme productions, but the musical production is always well refined.
Ensemble Economique – In Silhouette
