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 + 64 pages booklet – Swarming
Eric La Casa’s latest release is a praise to the beauty and the sound charm of his beloved city, Paris. Paris Quotidien is produced by Swarming, a label founded in 2009 by La Casa with Philip Samartzis and Jean-Luc Guionn and includes three long suites, all lasting more than 20 minutes. The album package is an elegant cardboard artwork, including a 64 page photo booklet. The concepts Eric La Casa explores in his research on the French capital’s sound DNA are the themes of living, which he defines as “a story of an ordinary environment”, without having the rhetoric or grandeur of a typological (or, even worse, historical or touristic) exposition. The author highlights that “in contrast to a virtual address (email…)”, he questions “the significance of living here at this address, in this building, said to relate to my existence, to my life, in this time of listening.” What is the meaning of living in a specific place? Is the symbolic value of a big city somehow related to an intimate and fragmented experience as the recording of audio tracks from his own domestic and living environment? Eric La Casa is sure of this, despite his position seeming political, rather than being representative of a metropolitan imprinting related to some specific “vibes” trends, a kind of “sound genoma” different from city to city (according to a psyco-geographical derivative model). Eric La Casa has created a temporary and localized archive of minimal events, structured in a storytelling and abstract way, mediated by his own audio experience, according to the definition that “the listening here is the living of one year.” Eric La Casa knows how the perception of reality enlarges what it means to make music today and after this theory of evolution he is able to take some freedom. For example, feeling free to start from himself, to put into music the places and the situations of his daily life: the apartment, the flow of the days, his harmony with the outside environment, the “body” of listening and its position, the sharing of a living place, because, as he highlights: “living in the city first means accepting to be a co-inhabitant there.”
Eric La Casa – Paris Quotidien
