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 – Farpoint
Rosa Arruti, better knows under the name Nad Spiro, is a long term activist of the dark-electronic and experimental fields. After the last work on tape, La Casa Encendida, a project featuring Maurizio and Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien) and produced by Sloow Tapes, she releases a new solo release on Farpoint in CD format. The work has some dark and evocative sequences, filled with audio samples from different sources and inspirations. Following rigorous research and a “cultured” audio art practice, Nad Spiro sets a sound which even less ethereal clubbers may be excited by. Despite this project originating from a residence at Sirius Arts Centre in Cobh, Ireland (“Waves and Signals – The Harbour as a Setting for Acoustic Transit”), we wouldn’t be surprised if these imaginative radio signals and sonic dissertations created some energy in different spaces, not only in cultural institutions and galleries. Transmission codes (real or fake) and narrative elements of different origins (for example, a foggy harbour atmosphere, the experiments of Marconi in Mizen Head and his floating laboratory Elettra, shipwreck cartography and travel chronicles from this characteristic part of the Irish coastline) together create some sensitive and reactive sound landscapes, which are at the same time poetic, unusual and charming. Nad Spiro adds all her electronic equipment: analog machines, processed guitars, virtual synths, radar pulses and effects but there are also some random recordings and sophisticated sound libraries. It seems to walk a resounding path, immersed in the nocturnal and ghostly atmosphere of the Irish harbour, a suggestive town known in the middle 70s under the little reassuring name of The Cove. Rosa Arruti feels comfortable to play the sounds in this gloomy and mysterious background, driven by unexpected connections and audio materials with subliminal charm. Over the six tracks, the artist displays elegant sounds and sound-designer audio suggestions, but at the same time she shows some feelings which can be defined performative, typical of somebody who has taken real steps on a stage.
