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.
3 x Vinyl – Axis
“There are many ways to imagine the future”. The techno icon, legendary producer and DJ Jeff Mills is immediately clear on this point. In the past he explored more experimental and artistic forms, often performing in non-canonical locations, engaging with different fields, subjects and out of the ordinary settings. The Detroit master says that a way “might be to look back”, “to see what’s similar to what we see today”. In the past there was a vision of the future, which would be our present tense now, and the anachronistic comparison with a future that never came to pass is always fascinating. A larger creative solution “might be to invent and make a time machine”, trying to give a quick look directly to the future. Another way, this time including green and neospiritualist thinking, might be instead to “use our natural senses to feel how our future might be, using that survival instinct that allowed mankind to flourish until today”. Mills expresses a very current and post-pandemic thought, which draws a line between what was and what it will be and retrieves an ancestral clairvoyance, “a supernatural ability to perceive events in the future and beyond the normal sensorial contact”. This is a mediumistic session and in The Clairvoyant different extrasensorial perceptions are tested, recovering an almost ambient dimension, free from the stimulation of clubbing stimulations or from multimedia visual distractions. This new release for the Axis catalogue is a serious electronic work, an essay on change, without denying the past. This clairvoyance, or maybe it would be more accurate to talk about “clairaudience”, the faculty of perception at a distance through hearing is maybe the answer in these uncertain times. In short, times change and when uncertainty becomes the norm, there is more than ever a need for artists and experiences that show us a new path.
Jeff Mills – The Séance
Jeff Mills – Pseudoscience
Jeff Mills – Remote Viewing
Jeff Mills – Someone Who Feels Things
Jeff Mills – Calling All Loved Ones
Jeff Mills – Shadow With A Golden Aura
Jeff Mills – Wait I Feel A Presence
Jeff Mills – Three Signs From The Other Side – Sign 1
Jeff Mills – Three Signs From The Other Side – Sign 2
Jeff Mills – Three Signs From The Other Side – Sign 3
Jeff Mills – Questions Decisions And Consequences
Jeff Mills – The Feeling Anything Is Possible
Jeff Mills – Dancing Shadows
Jeff Mills – Ganzfeld Experiments
Jeff Mills – The Spirit World
