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 – Cat Werk Imprint
In this album Olivia Louvel collects nine compositions, inspired by the life and words of Barbara Hepworth. She was an English modernist sculptor, a contemporary of Henry Moore. The artist passed away in 1975 in a dramatic fire in her studio in Cornwall, which now is the location of a museum focused on her work. It’s not the first time Louvel performs this kind of narration. She is always at her ease when she works between poetic creation and research: she organizes her own voice in a sculptural way, moving over clean cuts and harmonic roundness, digital starts and moments of silence, with the activation of her controlled operations in a sung or spoken way. The first track “Use Your Own Body” immediately leads us to the atmosphere of the project, with some clatters, like a typewriter nervously in use, and seductive spoken word lullabies. For her compositions, the sound artist uses AudioSculpt, a very visual software for the deployment of the sound. This generated iteration is not so different from the way a visual artist develops a sculpture from sketches and maquettes, with the following modifications of some details later on. The physicality of the sculpture and the sound in its concreteness are milestones, lightening any cut of the tracks presented here. “I detest a day with no music, no work, no poetry”, Hepworth wrote. In Louvel this is a reactive substance, reinforced by creativity, passion and the proximity to such a model of a woman. In “I Draw What I Feel In My Body” Louvel goes even further, giving voice to a broad proto feminism. Here the words are organized in a new form, as they are modeled, an operation once again dealing with sculpture. One of the most significant tracks of the album is “The Weaver”, a piece that displays a slightly disturbing, hypnotic, grace. The hits of “The Sound Of A Mallet” create a frozen rhythmicity, the perfect music for an artist giving form to a work. SculptOr is perfect in its fusion of two personalities on the same page, a work full of suggestions and musically impeccable.
Olivia Louvel – SculptOr
