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″ – Slimvolume
This vinyl production references modernist experimentalism and is largely influenced by the tradition of spoken word and sound poetry. The tracks are interdisciplinary and proto-multimedia art forms, here developed by artists such as Martha Rosler, Ed Ruscha, Andrea Fraser, Sol LeWitt, Shilpa Gupta, Art and Language, Lawrence Weiner and Yvonne Rainer. Deconceptual Voicings is made of single tracks composed of interviews, recorded mainly as a complement to the movie Conceptual Paradise (2003-2005) by Stefan Römer. The director made use of deep exchanges about conceptual art and created some fundamental proofs of this stylistic approach, a form of art without subject, completely speculative and focused on limited topics. The declarations he collected were later selected and transformed into a musical composition. Following the nature of the research, the work offers a non-neutral transposition, with fragments of sounds, syllables and consonants transformed into rhythmical schemes, while slogan, declarations and some passages of text were sampled into unconventional and unpredictable sung-spoken forms. This is a kind of global polyphony of positions and sounds, elegant and well arranged, sweetly subversive, but definitely not functional now, given the current trends of art. The project is based on an idea by Stefan Römer and Marc Matter (concept and composition), featured by Lizzie Davis (sound engineering) and Dirk Lebahn (graphic design) and kindly supported by Musikfonds, a Berlin institution that promotes the contemporary music in all its genres, complexity and diversity. The album was released on joint by Mount Analogue (Stockholm) and Slimvolume (London) in a 500 copy edition. The cover image belongs to Ed Ruscha.
Stefan Roemer, Marc Matter – Deconceptual Voicings
