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 – 901 Editions
In Circular Arguments Adam Basanta once more focuses his transversal skills on the multi-sensorial organisation of changeable choreographies across microphones, speakers, kinetic systems and customised software. For some time now, practices of listening and communication have been the subject of Basanta’s research, often achieved by using everyday objects that are carefully abstracted from their conventional uses. Here, the recordings are drawn from some sound installations created by the exclusive use of live feedback and environmental iterations. The artist claims he is not sure that the audio experimentations he collects in this album can be defined as “music”. However, we have no doubts: this is a conceptually sophisticated operation, evidencing musical knowledge and an edgy style. Such sounds do exist, undoubtedly, and occupy a precise space, although they are not elaborated within a strict compositional structure. In short, they are worthy of all the attention of the listener. Basanta considers the performance context to be a priority: the presence of the audience establishes and makes real a physical relationship with specific vibrational experiences. By moving from the installation to the digital medium, these works resonate differently, but we believe they don’t lose their musical breath and that feeling of apparently autonomous airy quiet, which was originally part of a more complex and physical performativity. The sounds are clear and minimal and draw the attention. Thanks to their purity, the volumes are always highly controlled; nothing prevents us from listening to this mix of frequencies as a form of music. Here the technology, despite being very “rough”, apparently is taken as an integration of our daily life, and somehow instils a very aesthetic and ethical “sensitivity”. 901 Editions by Fabio Perletta, based in Roseto degli Abruzzi (Italy) can once again be proud of this release.
Adam Basanta – Circular Arguments
