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 – Zoharum
Zoharum has a quite eclectic relationship with its releases, alternating proposals from different electronic scenes: ambient, minimal, industrial, dub and experimental. 78-Angst, for example, is a conceptual collection of productions Patryk Gęgniewicz (Revisq) and Lukasz Szalankiewicz (Zenial) composed between 2013 and 2019. The compositions were developed in different locations and settings. Zenial recorded in Poznań, Cracovia and New York and Patryk in Wałbrzych, Jelenia Góra and Varsavia. This clearly brought some specific influences to the sounds and the editing process. Every track shows its specific sound and atmosphere and other artists were also involved for remixes and reediting. The Fisherboyz, namely Dawid Chrapla and Dominik Żochowski, worked on “At the Gates”, providing a less emphatic and minimal rendition of the original version, following in the steps of some groovy and clubbing electronics. But actually not all the tracks follow this lead; we can find also some ambient, drone and techno contents too. For example, Ursus Sykot makes a remix of “Im Wald” and what comes out is actually a continuous and quite dirty sound. Dawid Chrapla offers a version of “At the Gates” that is sharper by using some pseudo-industrial treatments, metallic rings and space-glitch whirls. The band’s name originates from Angst by Gerald Kargl, a quite dark and disturbing film, which the French director Gaspar Noé considered as an inspirational source and fundamental model for his cinematic style. ‘78’ refers to the birth year of the members of the combo. The sequences of Angst78 are not so psychopathic and disturbing as the plot of Kargl’s film, but definitely don’t include any kind of “nice” sound writing, since they displays a ghostly, introverted and meditative approach, filled with ambient openings but always turning to dilated and noisy sequences and probably also inspired by the many experiences both musicians collected from the sound design of videogames such as Painkiller and Escape Room.
Angst78 – 78-Angst
