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.
Vitor Joaquim – Impermanence
A feeling of anxiety immediately takes us when listening to “Here and Now”, the first track of the last release by Vitor Joaquim, a sound artist we remember especially for his works produced by Knivitu, Feld and Crónica Electronica. In the last years many changes took place in the arts, in society and in daily life, without even considering the geopolitical events that nobody could have predicted. But Joaquim seems to focus his analysis on a different level of mutation, which is more intimate but at the same time still primary and reactive. The declarations about the project and the album’s sounds actually show an open change compared to past works. The settings become more dark and introverted, but the quality is still significant, thanks to the balance of sound waves, the effects of the vocal parts and the hypnotic combination of the iterated melodies. If the current events seem more predictable, the theme of decomposition is a new urge for the Portuguese experimenter, leading him to a scenario that is more rarefied than before. The impermanence is a framework, a context, one of the possible forms of the transience in the phenomena: in some passages the sound events seem to take some quietist shape, but eventually they always have an evolution, though sometimes unpredictable. The work presents some Eastern flavors and some space suggestions, and some vague dub influences that then change and become something else. However, we find again here an element characteristic of Joaquim style: the use of different vocal samples modified with electronics, a solution he has loved for a long time, when the caesura were more ambient. The focus on how the things evolve during the time is not lived passively. A proof of this is the accurate artwork, based on a Visacard USB-pen, made in white and transparent plastic, including a limited edition with acrylic sculptures by Gui Grazina. It is impossible not to mention that part of the lyrics are excerpts of an interview of Arvo Part, “Modern Minimalists, with Bjork”. Other samples come from a tape letter or from a female voice. The result is always wonderful and poetic, and so we can say this album is unmissable.
Vitor Joaquim – Impermanence
