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 – 4AD
In her previous two albums – Movement and Platform – Holly Herndon has already demonstrated her vocal control in a very original and structured way, despite the use of distortions, effects and extreme edits. She was perfectly able to negotiate the space between an extreme conceptualism and the kind of beats typical of club style. It’s also clear that the final destination should have been different, considering her studies with figures such as John Bischoff, James Fei, Maggi Payne and Fred Frith. However, after being deeply rooted to the German metropolis, the temptation to remain within a style close to techno might have been very strong. But things went differently. For some time now the cosmopolitan experimenter has considered a laptop to be a natural expression of her body and mind. Her voice is her most powerful tool of expression: as a courageous and natural result, she chose to make everything more complex and unpredictable, by adding a choral ensemble to the mix. The artist highlights that technology is not a dehumanizing agent: clearly, she wants to prove this not only with words, but by adding to the choir many cuts, compressions and vocal tricks she usually performs with. However, the real difference in the making of Proto consists in the design and in the management of Spawn, an artificial intelligence agent she customized together with Mathew Dryhurst and the programmer Jules LaPlace. The software literally learned to recognise, interpret and re-elaborate any voice using neural networks to set all the musical chains. All the vocal elements are completely deconstructed and the possible combinations multiply themselves out of all proportion. Herndon’s shaker blends echoes of Bulgarian voices, electronic gothic, ecclesiastical songs and murmurs of Laurie Anderson, together with solemn tones and synthetic sentimentalism. The digital strict logic and the human sensitivity give together life to a new awareness. Holly Herndon uses sound as a raw material and sets a narrative aesthetics, by giving to Spawn the ductility and the reaction capacity typical of a performer. This is a fundamental album and the starting point of a new era.
Holly Herndon – Proto
