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 – raster
Mika Tapio Vainio, who passed away in April 2017, was one of the musicians and experimenters who most influenced the new electronic aesthetic of the nineties, grafting glitch elements and fomenting a minimal but aggressive techno, infused with distorted frequencies and melodic atmospheres. Vainio, both in Pan Sonic and under his moniker Ø, is also significant to the history of Raster-Noton, a label that has long since chosen to separate, returning to its origins as two separate entities. Franck Vigroux and Mika Vainio played together at Berghain and also collaborated in a live performance at La Muse en Circuit and for “Luxure”, perhaps the last live recording before the death of Vainio. “Drive”, the first track of Ballades Sur Lac Gelé, dates back to the last period of collaboration between the two, although the setting seems to us more dynamic and rhythmically free, with the presence of some ‘space-vintage’ elements. In short, it is to Mika Vanio that this track and the entire album are dedicated, but Vigroux does not abdicate his personal touch, made up of synthetic starts and varied modulations, of futuristic quotes and impending dystopian flows. The following, “Cygnus X-1”, is more elegiac but exhibits just as much energy and sci-fi treatment, while in “Ritournelle” it is the more dreamlike and experimental Vigroux articulating minimal electronic modulations in a highly emotional riff. In short, the alternation of moments and interactions between the different parts are always distributed with skill and remarkable narrative aptitude, relying on a studied succession of melodic and rhythmic sequences. The album closes with “Atotal” where Vigroux turns his hand to the crudest and most dissonant repertoire of which he is capable, reminding us once more of his harsh and hyper-vivid collaborations with Vainio. Franck Vigroux cultivates the suggestion inherent in the title of a walk on a frozen lake and is at ease giving life to settings kept vivid by a constant tension. At the same time, he is able to set up some elegiac passages and dynamic resonances, which we image were even more functional and creative in the live performances.
Franck Vigroux – Ballades Sur Lac Gelé
