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.
3CD + booklet – Nakama
Can music, with its different language, engage with Buddhist philosophy? In New Rituals, Christian Meaas Svendsen proves this is possible, by exploring the relationship between form and freedom, modern Western culture and traditional Oriental culture. The three CDs in the edition are based on the same source: 10 ancient sutra or Zen chants. The object of the experiment is an independent self, inseparable from everything else and in continuous mutation. In some parts of New Rituals this takes the shape of devotional chants, while elsewhere it takes the form of an expressive and airy free jazz, and in others it’s just a simple lullaby accompanied by a double bass. #Christian# Meaas Svendsen is the medium of an ancient knowledge, one that goes beyond him. The other musicians, Agnes Hvizdalek, Adrian Løseth Waade, Ayumi Tanaka and Andreas Wildhagen, follow the same emotional wave and manage to find their own way in the musical style, something in between classical music and the traditional chant. Nakama Records can be happy with this work, which was made possible thanks to the support of Oslo Norsk Komponistforening and Rinzai Zen Center, a location where the practices of meditation are essentially silent. Zen Buddism is a religious tradition with its own rituals and fixed forms, but essentially it is anti-dogmatic and anti-intellectualist. This is particular true of the Rinzai school, which believes that illumination is a sudden event, reachable only through meditation or forms of paradoxical dialogues. In Japan and elsewhere, Zen has deeply influenced literary and artistic production: from poetry to painting, from the No drama to the architecture of gardens and temples, from the disposition of the flowers to the relationship with several arts and subjects, until eventually the music of John Cage, which is entirely permeated by the complexity and the mutability that Zen suggests. Our attempts at investigation and classification can only be defeated; what is left, without easy simplification, gets us closer to the real process and brings us back to all its full complexity.
Christian Meaas Svendsen With Nakama And Rinzai Zen Center Oslo – New Rituals
