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.
LP – Dacapo
On the island of Holmen, in the center of Copenhagen, stands the Copenhagen Opera House, one of the most important and expensive opera houses ever made. For political and fiscal reasons, and also because of its extreme contemporaneity, the space was the object of many controversial opinions and debates even before its official opening on January 2005. The collective formed by the multidisciplinary artist Superflex, the composer Anders Monrad and the journalist Nikolaj Heltoft joined this discussion with a project based on the events leading to the opening of the building, a project which is also an artistic consideration of the musical genre of opera itself. It is interesting to stress that the making of this meta-musical project has also been subject to some difficulties and complications. The Mærsk Opera, after the refusal of the Minister of the Cultural Affairs Uffe Elbæk and the management of Royal Danish Theatre, was then exhibited at the Center of Contemporary Art Kunsthal Nikolaj in Copenhagen. The lack of support from these cultural institutions prevented the staging of the work for some years, until the production of an art movie including the entire work was made. The music was recorded at the Opera House only after the preview of the movie and the whole score is only now officially published by Dacapo Records. When Anders Monrad and Superflex developed the booklet and the music, they drew inspiration from the fact that the creator of the Opera House, Mærsk McKinney Møller, a Danish ship owner, capitalist and philanthropist, was actually not a lover of the operatic genre, but, more prosaically, enjoyed different styles such as easy listening and country rock. Indeed, this paradox was crucial for the development of the music, which has a rich instrumentation and, in particular, many rhythmic elements. The grandiose architecture of the Opera House stands in front of the official residence of the Danish Queen, on the harbour side and lined up with the Marble Church. The building is a symbol for how the negotiation of power provided by corporate money is unavoidable in contemporary society.
The Mærsk Opera – Trailer
