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 + booklet – Aagoo
Performing under the moniker Piles are the percussionists and improvisers Guigou Chevenier, Anthony Laguerre and Michel Deltruc. The French musicians work between Nancy and Avignone in France and are now releasing the album Una Volta, an all-instrumental collection including eight compositions for drums. The CD includes an austere but engaging booklet designed by Bas Mantel, a summary featuring stylized typography based on a combination of font and small iterated images, alternated with one or two pages of graphic processing. All of the elements are in black and white, reminding one of a visual style typical of Pop, or, if you prefer, Punk culture.
The ensemble was established in 1985 when Chevenier gave life to Les Batteries, another collective where there were many left-field experimental rock drummers, but also other musical instruments. This rock inclination is confirmed already in the first track, “Drones and Piles”, a track full of sibilant, aggressive buzzes, a recombination of different music ages with a deep art rock character. The rhythms are quite raw and the improvisational influences very basic. As such, it’s not so easy to recognize a precise structure, so we move on to the next compositions, some longer than the first one, with “Kraut and Piles” and “Materials in US” both lasting over nine minutes. The noise elements are not foregrounded and the raw grain of the acoustic drums with some bare electronics altogether make for a bewildering effect. In our opinion, the trio produces the most interesting performances in the longer tracks, where they better develop an aesthetic strategy whose nature is abstract, disconnected and experimental. Among the others, we pick “Chambred’echo”, the most atmospheric, clinking and energetic track. The final composition, “Marie”, is also longer than nine minutes. It starts with some dark drones, light drumming, rolls and beats, always at a controlled volume. The result is a constant unresolved tension. Una Volta bewilders the listener with its estranging continuum, the organised alternation of rhythmic elements and the uninhibited, direct and far from abstract approach (something that’s not always easy to find in the audio-art scenarios).
Piles – Una Volta
