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 – Aussenraum
The Diatribes are a duo formed by Cyril Bondi and d’incise. Bondi is in charge of the rhythm section and plays the electric organ, while d’incise is focused on the electronic components such as sampling and melodic parts. In Echoes & Sirens, released by Aussenraum, different musicians accompany the duo: Raphael Ortis on electric bass and horns, Pierre-Antoine Badaroux on alto saxophone, Betrand Denzler on tenor saxophone, Louis Laurain on trumpet and Fidel Fourneyron on trombone. The common theme this collective seems to be engaged with is the possible relationship between dub and experimental music – definitely not the newest intersection, but one that is nonetheless subject to many different interpretations. In the first track, “Dub fire will be burning”, which is over ten minutes long, the wind instruments cyclically set the breath of the composition, with a few rhythmic elements and vocal samples in the background. In the track that follows, “Tell me, what do you see ?”, also over ten minutes long, the first impact is very musical but then something stops or does not take off as expected, with the presence of different introductions, abstractions and plunderphonic jerks, played by real instruments. In “Don’t trouble I (Oh no)”, the strategies are similar; many elements are played without pushing them to a complete evolution, with an unresolved development and some work made on the borders, in this case a weird fuzzy and circus march. The last track is “Continually”. Here, the eclectic combo shows some of the classic ingredients of dub; for example, the use of delay and sirens, and gives life to a version close to ambient scores with elements of post-jazz. Maybe Echoes & Sirens, is, for the duo, a final chapter, started in the conceptual dub direction of their previous albums Augustus (INSUB, 2013) and Great Stone/Blood Dunza (Aussenraum, 2015). We don’t know if in the future they will give more stress to drums and bass, following this beaten road, or if they hasten towards a more experimental direction. One way or another a change of course is to be expected, because most in this field has been already explored and there is no intention to give life to an additional sub-genre.
Diatribes – Echoes & Sirens
