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 – New Domain
According to Science, sound waves cannot transmit in a vacuum. Even the sun’s auditory emissions cannot reach us because of the absence of vibrational phenomena. In this project the multimedia artist Jeff Talman collaborated with Dr. Daniel Huber, an astrophysicist at Hawaii University and member of the Kepler Mission run by NASA on 2013-2014. Talman tries to go beyond these limitations: from a careful analysis of the sun’s oscillation, he develops a possible reproduction of the audio emissions of our solar system’s parent star. However, we don’t know how these sounds were modeled and adapted to the range of the human ear and to the specific acoustics of St Peter’s Church in New York, the space where the project was presented for the first time. An ethereal engagement is guaranteed, thanks to the refined and rarefied passages and to the activation of an ideal tuning that aspires to superior and intelligible harmonies. The compositions Jeff Talman usually produces are related to the buzz of Earth, the sounds coming from the depths of the deepest oceans and the symphonies of the stars, and they mostly take place in partnership with scientists and in public events. This can be considered the real benchmark of the versatile American musician-artist, a sort of celebration of archetypal forces which takes place with the blessing of science and in this case with the use of extremely precise measures of optical interferometry. The qualities of these sounds stand out as in a symphonic composition. The location of the show becomes a gigantic device in communion and in tune with the sun. Talman is a graduate of music composition and used to teach and conduct orchestra at New York City College and at Columbia University. He is a pioneer of ambient sound composition and techniques of resonance and feedback. His installations often include sculptural elements, video projections and other visual objects. On these premises the result cannot be anything but brilliant: the control of every single ring of the chain is perfect, there are no flaws, even if the quiet weaves lead us to think that the power of what lights us is not so vital and fierce.
Jeff Talman – Under The Sun (2018)
