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 – Aagoo
Israel Martínez is a Mexican sound artist based in Guadalajara, who always expresses an intense and critical social-political activism. This is strongly influenced by the context he lives in, a reality full of simple and daily events with many furtive elements. The atmosphere this album evokes often vibe with silences full of sounds. Martinez feels the urge to give a space-time dimension to every audio event, with the use of both field recordings and digital synthesis processes. After a very active period between 2005 and 2013, Martinez decided to give a different rhythm to his studio works and his performances. Released by Aagoo, Pausa is published at the same time as the first sound performance “Love and Rage”, commissioned by the CTM 2019 Radio Lab Call in Berlin. In every sound, Martínez introduced a special charm, inviting the listener to listen carefully and leading him step by step between scattered silences and fluxes of energy, drops and refined syntonies, metallic emissions and background noises. There is an incredible virtuosity in these compositions that are apparently made from nothing. A whistle or a mechanical repetition may seem to be a flapping of wings, creaks, scrapings and a full list of sound emissions that are never overloaded or casual. It’s often hard to define the origin of certain sounds: for example, it’s not clear if we are listening to some bird sounds that are synthetically filtered, or if there is some additional audio recording at play, that, if placed in a different context, would assume another aspect. In some cases the sounds can come from other recordings and are overlapped on purpose. But this does not create any confusion or uncertainty, and often produces some precise effects that engage our perception and cause us to shift between what is real and what is the result of our imagination. The six tracks of the album have been recorded over the last six years in different situations and are really vivid and engaging, despite their radical experimentalism. The listening experience is always pleasant and full of surprises, and never falls back on ordinary or superficial solutions.
Israel Martinez – Pausa
