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 – Arteksounds
With a tremendous scenic impact modulated between extreme vocals, audio experimentation and performance art, Stephanie Pan presents Have Robot Dog, Will Travel. This project is also supported by Ensemble Klang at the Festival Dag in de Branding, an event dedicated to the female voice at Den Haag, Netherlands in 2018. The mix of sounds is immediately engaging and the carpet of textures behind the voice is hypnotic, rubbery and machinic in the first track “On Handstands”. Here, the interpretation is very refined and evocative and also includes some guttural moans. The following “Song For Being Alone #1” is not far behind. The voice is supported by a delicate lullaby, a recurring element between the other sound effects, the resonances and the sweet passages. Somebody may argue we are close to the borders of pop and we won’t have enough courage to deny it, but here there is always something slightly disturbing or extremely virtuosic that brings us back to other less ordinary and usual lands. The aesthetics and the sensitivity of Stephanie Pan push the boundaries of what we might define as regular and this is never more true than in the imperfect blend of human voice and analogue instruments and tools.
According to the author, the album is an ode to abstraction, ambiguity, unspoken words – “an intimate portrait on a rich bed of chaos and noise”. Clearly the object of focus is a contact point between the digital and the analog world, some limbo where the use of toys and tools brings us back on the road to imperfection. By no coincidence the lyrics also focus on the concept of ambiguity and are built around this topic. The result is passionate and intense, but maybe the work needed more control in some situations, especially when it gets a bit far from the electroacoustic-experimental universe and resembles instead something closer to trip-hop or some long-ago season of abstract music (“Arbitrary Failures”), when the contrasts become too extreme and the textures too playful. But this artist has many strings to her bow and we are sure she will keep making great use of her qualities in studio and will continue to refine her object of focus in future.
Stephanie Pan – Have Robot Dog, Will Travel
