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 + booklet – Immediata
This album is a 49 minutes long composition, played by Anthony Pateras on the pipe organ and Erkki Veltheim on electric violin. From the beginning, the work shows a dark and hypnotic continuum. The ghostly suggestions and the sounds released inspire a meditative, ecstatic and psycho-acoustic universe. As usual for the Immediata editions, the recordings are presented with a long interview with the authors. Presented in a 24 page booklet, the interview is divided into 13 questions, focused on the current state of the creativity in different fields, such as the music, the economy and the technology and on the ability to be always open to new approaches and experiences. It’s interesting to lose yourself in the cloudy, low volume, sound waves, so low as to be almost impossible to ear, and not to feel the charm inspired by the questions discussed and by the slow and inexorable following of the sounds. If the listening experience is monolithic, the reading is much more sparkling. The booklet is full of references, just to give some examples: Nick Cave, Chris Kraus, Iris Murdoch, Michel Foucault, Zadie Smith, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Duchamp and Simone Weil. If “the best form of resistance is positive action,” Veltheim says, it’s the pattern overlap to shape the sound flux. This flux has a development which is harmonious but not necessarily elegiac, minimalist but not punitive, and brings to some suspended and ethereal dimension. It’s always our perception to put us in the condition to question what happens around us, to opening the door to other information sources and to shape our “physical” and “emotional” taste, thanks to an abstract and speculative involvement. However, these sensorial phenomena can realize a solemn and at the same time liberating breath, a breath which is pulsating and not easy for the listener to pick up and brings a new condition of attention and passion. Not casually, Pateras questions Veltheim about how he deals with the split between his analytic and intuitive selves and how he keeps its attraction a mystery. The answer is not taken for granted and the rational mind is not exactly the main way to drive us between the impulse and the action.
Anthony Pateras / Erkki Veltheim – The Slow Creep Of Convenience
