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.
12” Vinyl – Research & Waves
Cover (Something Newly Missing) was released on July 12th 2020, at the closure of the exhibition Read Before the Fire. This exhibition was curated by Kunstverein Grafschaft Bentheim, an organization specializing in contemporary art located in Neuenhaus (Lower Saxony). For this occasion, Lucas Odahara developed a multimedia and site-specific project focusing on the themes of language in times of loss. The loss we meditate on refers to memories, social rights, political rights and laws as they relate to political unrest in Brazil and the disappearance of a large part of the Amazon rainforest. The concept of loss is not understood here as an act of mourning but is introduced as a possibility for finding greater vigilance in the face of something recently lost. The vinyl edition, published by Research & Waves, includes the sound installation by Odahara, with music by Luiz Monteiro and lyrics by Elmas Senol, Amanda Mont’alvão and Pedro Oliveira, alongside textual works, images and objects. While the audio element is fundamental in Lucas Odahara’s sound installation, the visual and textual suggestions are also very important.Language and its ongoing presence in everyday life are at the center of this investigation, which questions conventional narrative models in texts, spoken language and images that continue to shape our perception of the existing world order and its respective power dynamics. The album includes two tracks of the same title and length (around 13’ e 15”) from the original sound installation. The first is a heartbreaking iteration of musical scales, filled with the typical loneliness of South America. The second seems to be drawn from audio samples of open and rainy spaces. In the liner notes there is no shortage of heartfelt and original reflections on the concept of cover, which evoke different audiences and a sense of protection, uniqueness and security. Cover (Something Newly Missing) transports listeners into an idealized past and they are immediately immersed in this moment of negation and nonessentialism, here revealed in all its potential.
Lucas Odahara with Luiz Monteiro – Cover (Something Newly Missing)
