Critical digital culture and media arts · Since 1993
L'Archivio Neural è un archivio di pubblicazioni noi raccolte nel corso degli anni. Sfoglia la nostra collezione qui.
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, meglio conosciuta con il moniker di Nad Spiro, può vantare un ormai sedimentato attivismo in ambito dark-elettronico e sperimentale: dopo la sua ultima uscita su cassette, La Casa Encendida, un progetto collaborativo con Maurizio e Roberto Opalio (My Cat Is An Alien), edito da Sloow Tapes, approda adesso su Farpoint e con un formato più consueto – quello cd – torna in versione solista ad agitare sequenze piuttosto cupe ed evocative, condite da vocal e sample audio di varia origine ed ispirazione. Sul crinale d’una ricerca molto coerente e nel segno di una pratica “colta” di audio art, Nad Spiro mette in scena un sound che potrebbe appassionare anche meno eterei clubber e, seppure il progetto nasca da una residenza al Sirius Arts Centre di Cobh, in Irlanda (“Waves and Signals – The Harbour as a Setting for Acoustic Transit”), non ci meraviglieremmo davvero se questi immaginari segnali radio e soniche dissertazioni finissero per fomentare energie anche in altri spazi, che non siano quelli tipici di gallerie ed istituzioni culturali. Codici di trasmissione (reali o fittizi), elementi narrativi differentemente estrapolati (l’atmosfera nebbiosa di un porto, gli esperimenti di Marconi a Mizen Head e il suo laboratorio galleggiante Elettra, la cartografia dei naufragi e le cronache dei viaggi in questa parte caratteristica della costa irlandese) concorrono nella formazione di paesaggi sonori sensibilissimi e reattivi, poetici, inconsueti ed ammalianti. Nad Spiro v’aggiunge tutto il suo setting elettronico fatto di macchine analogiche e chitarre processate, virtual synth, impulsi radar ed effetti, ma non mancano nemmeno registrazioni occasionali e sofisticate librerie di suoni, che convergono in digressioni e percorsi risonanti, infusi della malia spettrale e notturna del porto irlandese, suggestiva località che a metà del settecento era conosciuta con il certo non rassicurante nome di The Cove. Rosa Arruti è assolutamente a suo agio in questo contesto uggioso e misterico, guidata da concatenazioni inattese e materiali auditivi dal subliminale fascino. Lungo tutte le sei tracce dispensate, l’artista fa sfoggio d’elegantissime sonorità e suggestioni auditive da sound-designer, esibendo però sentimenti ancora molto performativi, tipici di chi in passato ha calcato i palcoscenici in maniera certo meno virtuale.
