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 – Opa Loka
This album is the first solo project of Jean-Philippe Feiss, a French violoncellist and composer using the name Ze-Ka for this production released within the field of electronics and ambient music. The title Ghost Planet is a clear clue: the work is inspired by the constant sense of anxiety and guilt our environment suggests us being subject to exploitation and oppression. An estranging effect of loss gives life to a series of sequences: slow, minimal, dark, sometimes elegiac but also cold. The philosopher Mario Perniola, recently passed away, reminded us that “the detachment, the distance, the suspension of the disordered affections, of the immediate emotionality, of the passions without brakes” are always signs of a great style, which is necessary especially if the direct references are as epic a catastrophe as Chernobyl was. After the contamination following the incident – since 1986 the interdicted area between Belarus and Ukraine has been called the “zone” – has inspired several music works (from all genres, death metal to experimental across classical and pop). “Fission” and “Red Forest” are homages which can’t be definitely defined formal or manneristic, as something we listened to in the past. Quite the opposite, the radiations make the pieces hypervivid, the same radiations which raised the huge pain the population keeps living with until now. Feiss skilfully proves his goals are simple and pure. The drone developments are free from the unessential. The spaces between the notes are clearly organized, no space is left for pity, he keeps the work on an abstract plane of quotes and reminders. The instruments are just synthesizers and cello. We don’t know if the record was played in real time or is due to a following editing process, which is the most likely hypothesis, but for Ze-Ka the most important thing is the final effect, what’s happening in the repetition, a listening state of suspension which would be great if it had a thaumaturgical power too. It’s not the first drone music work by Opa Loka Records, but it’s definitely one of the most interesting, thanks to his weaves: serious but brilliant and refined at the same time.
Ze-Ka – Ghost Planet
