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 – Ici D’Ailleurs/Mind Travels
La collaborazione fra Massimo Pupillo (Zu, Ardecore) e Timothy Lewis, aka Thighpaulsandra (Coil) si era già concretizzata lo scorso anno, il 2017, quando fu realizzato per la Consouling Sounds a dicembre Leave A Silver Trail Through Blackness. Quella sensibilità dark ambient di allora si ritrova anche oggi in questo Mysterium Coniunctionis, progetto sonoro dalla struttura ancora più dronica e dalle trame post-apocalittiche, con sonorità molto cupe, sibilanti e come tenuemente raschiate nella prima parte, “Spagyria”, suite millimetrica nel dare vita a inviluppi anche industrial dal sapore cyber-cinematico. Pure nella seconda composizione, “Solve Et Coagula”, anche questa attorno i venti minuti di durata, il duo non si discosta poi troppo per atmosfere e coerenza della narrazione, tra emergenze auditive quasi impercettibili, dilatate arie e trasalimenti romantici. Suggestioni bene sintetizzate visivamente, inoltre, nelle foto di Francis Meslet scelte per l’artwork e intrise d’un elegante “ruin porn”. L’ambientazione da “castello abbandonato” ben s’addice infatti alle oniriche arie apparecchiate dai due sperimentatori, che sembrano finalmente aver trovato una distintiva ed efficace cifra stilistica. Nondimeno il titolo dell’album fa la sua parte nella confezione d’una simile personale mitologia: il riferimento infatti è allo psicologo Carl Gustav Jung e alle sue “riflessioni alchemiche”, un testo seminale e a sua volta ricco di forme, simboli, concetti e immagini, una sorta di passe-partout concettuale nell’evocare quello che la separazione e composizione degli opposti psichici comporta. In questo caso gli estremi tirati in ballo sono quelli di strutture musicali differenti che – tuttavia – sembrano irresistibilmente attrarsi (così come la proto-chimica alchemica può riuscire ad irretire ed ispirare anche un pensiero fortemente razionale). Numerosi sono i passaggi contemplativi ma altrettante le concatenazioni più noisy, fra digitale e analogico, con un’elettronica comunque pulsante, piena di suoni di sintesi, fluida e con effetti space. L’esatta miscelazione degli elementi messi in opera sembra essa stessa una sorta di rituale forma di conoscenza, sostanza densa e coinvolgente che attraversa quindi più generi, evocando atmosfere immersive, ricche di tensione, nebulose e spettrali.
Uruk – Mysterium Coniunctionis
