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.
Vinyl 12″ – Not On Label
For Roman Jungblut, a musician and media/sound artist native of Cologne, Back To Where It Never Started is the first solo project where he uses his real name, after years of collaborations with different bands, art installations and time spent on teaching. “Detox/Retox” is a five-minute track that is immediately engaging. Some harsh electronic emergencies and a melancholic melody are mixed together and provide ambient suggestions and ‘western style’ taste, drawing from different sources and giving life to a dreamy and narcotic strain. In the following track, “78-7-8” the attention is drawn by a progression, almost jazz style, with a base played on piano, some spurious elements and a little dissonant dirge, before suddenly dissolving into raw electronic treatments. The approach is experimental and space age in “Einsicht”, a track full of little audio emergencies, prolonged and subtle sounds, interference and rustlings, with a high volume electro-distortion, very strong and swallowing. “Two For Tooth” is the longest (11 minutes) and most voluminous track of the EP. In comparison with the others, this track most decisively shows entirely ambient structures, thanks to the dark and dilated atmosphere, which is well layered and insinuating. The material on display is large and varied and it’s hard to have a clear understanding of how these coexist in the work. The feeling we get is that Roman Jungblut is at ease in the dilated passages and at the same time wants to try new techniques, by mixing together dissonant forms with the music typical of his background. The exact definition of a style after a decade of absence is never easy. On the one hand, the heritage of knowledge is huge, but on the other there is the risk of losing touch. However, this does not affect the quality of the proposal, which is very interesting in its variety and shows a refined inventiveness that keeps the listener always on the alert, surrounded by unconventional elements.
Roman Jungblut – Back To Where It Never Started
