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 – Prostir
Cluster Lizard is the alias for collaborations between Dmytro Fedorenko and Kateryna Zavoloka. The duo formed in 2017 and are now on their third release under this moniker. The spark that gave rise to their latest project is direct and incendiary when compared to the their previous more conceptual releases, both as individual artists and as a partnership. “What could the soundtracks of our favourite films look like?” the two composers ask themselves. But instead of focusing on suitable films, they picked a book by the Ukrainian science fiction writer, philosopher and dissident Oles Berdnyk, Star Corsair. The fundamental concept stayed the same – the desire to write a soundtrack for a work considered by the two authors to be truly exciting and meaningful. Oles Berdnyk, who passed away in 2003, is one of the fathers of Ukrainian science fiction. While his career was regularly interrupted by the Soviet authorities and his literary activity spanned different genres and themes, his most significant legacy was Star Corsair, a 1970s work of science fiction, a treatment full of futuristic tensions and libertarian impulses, which only now shows its full potential. Influenced by the vision of personal development inherent in the novel, Cluster Lizard elaborate their own personal reflection that coincides with a profound transformation. The main concept of the novel is that without an “internal” freedom no “external” freedom is possible, a parallelism that in times of oppression and heavy regimentation – in the post-Cold War era, for example – can become a cult manifesto. The sounds played fully convey the atmospheres of the narrative, they are full of modernist inspiration, deep and dripping with hope, evocative and imaginative. Everything that is cybernetic and astral in the strings of Zavoloka and Fedorenko comes into play here, dark and mystical atmospheres, science and robotics, in an overlapping of textures and elements between minimalism and industrial music, straddling dark, intertwining, ambient and cosmic pulsations.
Cluster Lizard – Star Corsair
