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 – Scuola Fuori Norma
Scuola Fuori Norma at Catania is a space dedicated to the study of a range of contemporary theoretical and practical subjects. Its experimental courses are often based on the study of the audio-video media. The Canecapovolto collective, active since the beginning of this visionary academy in 1993, is the main promoter of these artistic unions. When listening to Normale, we immediately think that the reference range of the release is the cut and splice method typical of abstract music. We are reminded of the first Mo’ Wax experiments, the plagiarised and the plunderphonic, all experiences that peaked during the nineties, when some cultural and media activism practices started to spread their memes around and become more popular. Still today, Canecapovolto, mentions William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Italo Calvino in its current seminars, along with questions of the self-generative in writing and talks about White Noise, Psychic TV and Peter Zinovieff, with references to the cut-up and techniques of combinatorial writing. The tracks number nineteen in total, all quite short, with the exception of “Locus Solus”, over five minutes long, and also, maybe, the most musical, poetic and raga-esque track. All tracks are worthy of comment, however; take, for example, the disturbing “Two people Arrival”, the story in Italian of a fraud against an elderly #lady#. Any track reveals the use of some special technique or some extra-musical suggestion or some articulated background noise and poetic joints (the series of “Home Movie”, from track 10 to 14, for example). Quoting directly from Canecapovolto, the technological progress and the machine’s subconscious have indisputably “changed reality and made the narrations out of control”, consecrated by Frank Zappa playing a bicycle on live TV. Toys belonging to an age not fully digital become now circuit-bending music sources; contact microphones add noises and voices coming from the mysterious cosmic empty space create other noises and sound effects. All the elements find in the silence and in its opposite a sharp form of passion and artistic poisoning.
canecapovolto: cut and paste 1
