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 – Unsounds
Volume 1 – Untitled + 2 – The Mute, released by Unsounds, is a voice and live electronics project. Recorded in studio in Sweden after some concerts performed by the experimental composers Jessica Sligter and Wilbert Bulsink, it also features two instrumentalists, Kari Ranneklev on violin and Ole-Henrik Moe on viola. After listening to the first track, laconically named “A”, it’s clear that the work is based on the female voice. The voice is modulated, dilated, subjected to hypnotic and abyssal scans and submitted to some atonal interweaves. We are reminded of the free interpretation tradition, the result of a consolidated technique and at the same time a practice capable of opening listening experience to the different elements of the composition. The following short track “B” is on the opposite silent and it can be considered as a pause of perception before “C”, which shows a direct outburst, somehow more traditional and folk-like in the singing part, with a background full of a continuous and cacophonous flux of sounds, made on purpose extreme and definitely not serene. The next track swipes between the spoken and the sung, starting with no sounds and then showing in the background some rare interventions of sibilant electronics. Contrarily, the fifth and final track, “E”, begins just with sounds, very imaginative and dark, and later moves to be all-encompassing, alternated by some pauses of total silence. This is definitely not an easy album. The structure of the compositions is complex and always changing, despite being apparently based on few elements. The listening experience is not immediately engaging, the inexperienced to this sound won’t find it easy to get lost in the album’s atmospheres; however, the quality of the composition is unquestionable. Jessica Sligter debuted with Fear And The Framing using her real name only in 2012 and a few years later published A Sense Of Growth. Her former works already accustomed her audience to a mix of avant-garde, folk and jazz. Now with Wilbert Bulsink everything has become more elaborate, cerebral, dense and urgent.
