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 – Consumer Waste
Constant Linear Velocity by Stephen Conford is a project made in 2016 for Color Out of Space, an unconventional art and sound experimental festival that has taken place in Brighton for the past ten years. It consists of an installation of more than a hundred cabinets for computer, some empty and some with customized, automatized and amplified DVD units. In the following two years, the installation was also shown in Croydon, Oxford and Rennes, but the most powerful version took place in 2018 in Athens at Detritus Festival, in the Onassis Cultural Centre, where old computers from the Greek capital were used. Apparently the idea behind this kind of process is to create a new music from degraded media, with a melting of click and glitch, mechanical and hypnotic loops and any sort of hisses and tickings. Regarding the emphasis on junk and trash, it seems ironic that what is left from the work is now just recordings. Due to a misunderstanding in the transportation between France and United Kingdom the original hardware was confiscated. From being an art fetish, it turned again to its original condition as electronic waste. The album edition, produced by Consumer Waste, at first looks like a 7” hardback, similar to old single record vinyl packages. Probably this choice is deliberately reminiscent of outdated, neglected formats. The artwork is integrated into a 16-page booklet printed with a digital duplicator produced by the Riso Kagaku Corporation. In the 1980s, this was a cutting-edge technology, one largely reserved for large print volumes, but here we are looking at an edition of 150 copies. The photos of the “sculpture” show the magnificence of the operation and essays by Danae Stefanou and Stephen Cornford develop the theoretical and aesthetic inspiration behind the project. The act of opening and closing a CD or DVD slot works as a difficult border between the physical and the digital space; this mechanical obsolescence is then amplified on purpose and almost becomes an ode to the lost physicality of our multimedia formats, a reminder of the persistent material presence of some technologies that are often perceived in a more ethereal way.
Stephen Conford – Constant Linear Velocity
