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
In this second LP – his first one was Feed the Tape in 2016 and was released by Denovali – Hentschel puts aside a more experimental and purer approach to welcome pop influences and less persistent contemporary contaminations. If the real changes that influence our listening habits occur in ordinary lives, Electric Stutter finds its way to involve listeners thanks to high and low cultures, rarefied electronic mixes and elegiac minimalist sounds. The effect is at the same time delicate and powerful but cinematographic at last, reminding with “orchestral” manners of post rock groups with cold contents but melodic and redundant interactions.
This is not an unknown efficiency of contemporary mavericks at some electronic latitudes, and Hentschel manages to express his own authentic figure with a juxtaposition of music elements and structural sequences that support the complex score. The German composer has a remarkable sense of rhythm, spendable dramatic vocation and takes care of details. To the appeal of a console manipulator he adds amazing constructions that can be spent in a festival setting instead of a dancefloor. Even though Hentschel has experienced a classic education, his composing techniques are inspired by different backgrounds, so to make him closer to the dimension of a typical multimedia artist and not to that of a musician. Alongside the 9 tracks of the album – made up of a double vinyl 180 grams LP or CD – there are several auditory frames, following up narrations and symbolic sequences. Energy is present and the moving tension experienced in the mixing of the different sensory “frames” doesn’t allow one to lose attention and get distracted. The fore-coming Paradise is maybe just a light ticking, a few expanded notes and an unsolved art crescendo, that finds its best expression in front of a selected audience in a dark room.
Orson Hentschel – Electric Stutter
